Wednesday, August 3, 2022

Technology Woes and Cheers: Venn diagram edition

I'm writing questions for my Discrete Math course that will be available to my students (and others) through MyOpenMath, a free online homework system. I'm not very good at programming in their environment, but I'm learning. The cool thing about MyOpenMath is that it uses random numbers in the questions so that each student might get a (slightly) different question.

I wanted a way to ask, for a random Venn diagram: What is the set notation for this?

First, I needed a way to make lots of Venn diagrams, all pretty, and all in the same style. I searched the internet for a free online Venn diagram maker. Nothing right showed up. I looked at over a dozen sites. Many wanted me to sign in. That should not be necessary and I skipped those. None of the others were even close to what I wanted, which is pretty simple. Really?! Isn't this something lots of people would want? 

I asked about it on Math Educators Stack Exchange. Within hours, Cameron Williams posted an answer. He made it on desmos for me. (How sweet is that?! Amazing.) I know desmos well, so I was able to modify his version to be exactly what I wanted, in less time than I had already spent searching. (I suggest you go play with it - it's lovely.) And, if you want orange shading instead of blue, it's very easy to modify this to get exactly what you want.

Then I made 17 screenshots of various combinations of the basic regions, and named them based on the set notation. So "(A un B) int not C.jpg" is the filename for ...

 

Next I went back to MyOpenMath, and wrote most of my multiple choice problem. I'm still stuck on how to get it to display a randomly chosen image file. I think the folks at the help forum there will help me out on that. Once I finish fixing it, I'll edit this post to show the question. MyOpenMath allows attached videos to explain how to answer the questions. I think I might do a video for this one. 


So if you want a free online Venn diagram maker, it's here.  I don't know how to help google move this up in the searches so people can find it. Do you?




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