Sage in WeBWorK

Sage is an open source, online symbolic mathematical system. Details on Sage can be found at http://www.sagemath.org .

For use within WebWork, a special "single-cell" version of Sage is located at http://aleph.sagemath.org

## Template for calling Sage from within a WebWork pg file

DOCUMENT();

loadMacros(
"PGstandard.pl",
"PGchoicemacros.pl",
"MathObjects.pl",
);

TEXT(beginproblem());

# Regular WebWork setup

$funct  = Compute("x**4");
$funct_diff = $funct->D('x');

TEXT(<<SAGE_CODE);
<div id="singlecell-test">
<script type="application/sage">

var('x')
~~@interact
def _(f = ($funct)):
    df = diff(f,x,1)
    html('\( f \prime (x) = %s \)'%str(latex(df)) )

</script>
</div>

SAGE_CODE

TEXT(<<'SAGE_SCRIPT');

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://aleph.sagemath.org/static/jquery-1.5.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://aleph.sagemath.org/embedded_singlecell.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">

$(function() { // load only when the page is loaded
  var makecells = function() {
  singlecell.makeSinglecell({
      inputLocation: "#singlecell-test",
      editor: "codemirror",
      hide: ["editor","computationID","files","messages","sageMode"],
      evalButtonText: "Start/Restart",
      replaceOutput: true});
  }
  singlecell.init(makecells); // load Single Cell libraries and then
                              // initialize Single Cell instances
  });
</script>

SAGE_SCRIPT
# Continue pg file as normal

BEGIN_TEXT
$PAR
Using Sage above, determine the derivative of \[ f(x) = $funct \].
$PAR
\(f '(x) = \) \{ ans_rule(20) \}
END_TEXT

Context()->normalStrings;

ANS($funct_diff->cmp() );

ENDDOCUMENT();       
 

The example shows how to pass perl variables from the problem initialization into the sage block.

TEXT(<<SAGE_CODE);

where << SAGE_CODE without single quotes is necessary. However, the Sage code will not execute if no variables are actually passed in. Since $ and @ within the Sage code are now interpreted by perl, all latex delimiters should be converted from $ signs to \ ( and \ ) pairs. Additionally, any @interact needs to be escaped and written as ~~@interact

If you are not passing any variables, use:

TEXT(<<'SAGE_CODE');

where <<'SAGE_CODE' tells perl not to interpret variables. Sage code can then be pasted in verbatim without any need to convert formatting or escaping other characters.