robertdfrench/MathAcademyRails — Issue #6: Answers are evaluated based on string content. This is garbage.
Author: robertdfrench
Created: 2011-11-15 03:13:25+00:00
State: open

It is currently a gigantic pain in the ass to express all possible numerically equivalent answers as strings. ProblemTemplates must call `add_acceptable_answer` for every possible string representation of an answer. That means, if the answer to a question is 2/3, the following strings need to be prepared in case the user types them in:

* 2/3
* 0.67
* 0.667
* 0.6667
* 0.66667
* etc.

Along with any unsimplified version of 2/3. This is unacceptable for teaching children to explore mathematics, as it will invariably lead to valid answers being marked "wrong" because the template author failed to prepare some particular variant of the answer ahead of time. It is also a waste of time computationally.

This needs some thought.