Desmos now in STARMAST
Update
We are delighted to announce that interactive figures powered by Desmos Studios PBC. are now present in html versions of STARMAST resources.
You can now find the first instances of these interactive figures in Guide: Introduction to quadratic equations. Work is now being done to replace as many of figures in existing guides as possible.
Huge thanks to Desmos for providing us with access to their development tools!
Technical context
In our drive to provide the best, most accessible resources possible, we have been searching for the best way to provide diagrams. At the moment, the diagrams in study guides are static png files produced using TikZ, the inbuilt drawing package in LaTeX. While they look good, they cannot be parsed by screen readers and are liable to scaling issues when moving from computer to phone. Since the inception of the project, STARMAST has looked for better ways to represent mathematical diagrams and boost interactivity of the site.
Interactive figures powered by Desmos’s development tools solve this issue and then some. We are now able to render complex mathematical ideas in a wholly new and improved way, providing a much wider pedagogical scope than before. In addition to this, these figures come with some accessibility concerns already accounted for – such as being able to display in Braille.
Work is now being done to replace as many of the old png files in the existing guides as possible, certainly on the website version of the resources. The png files will still need to be maintained in the pdf and docx versions of the resources.
Version history
- v1.0 initial version written by tdhc 04/12/24.