Teaching Tools

Research has shown that presenting a multiple choice list of potential numeric answers to a problem is too easy to work around for students, meaning that it provides a very ineffective means to evaluate student knowledge or understanding of a topic. One way to counter this is to instead provide a selection of intervals, and ask students to select the interval that contain the solution set. This allows for the actual answer to be obscured (making it difficult for students to simply "plug in" and check values to find the right answer) as well as allowing for more complicated solution sets in multiple choice environments.

The difficulty in this process however, is coming up with intervals for both the correct solution set, and each of the "false" solution sets (aka "distractors"), while ensuring that all intervals are mutually exclusive choices for a given set - either the solution set or a specific distractor set. 

This tool aims to help automate this process by taking in a set of solution sets (where each solution set is either a single numeric value or a list of numeric values) and generating a corresponding list of solution intervals - each one representing a unique solution set out of those provided. The generator will automatically choose an appropriate "resolution" based on how close together your provided solution sets are, and display an error if your solution sets can't generate intervals (for example, if you have a solution set that spans a strict subset of another solution set).