** Using WeBWorK **

I think Bruce's answer was truncated. (You have to be careful when entering less-than signs, or Moodle will think they are part of a tag and possibly remove them. If there is no matching greater-than to end the tag, the whole rest of the message can be lost, as in this case).

I think Bruce was going to say to use

    ANS(Compute("0.5")->cmp( checker => sub {
      my ($correct,$student,$ans) = @_;
      my $x = $student->value;
      return $x > 1 && $x  < 2;
    }));

which is essentially what I was going to suggest as well.

There is an issue to consider, however, and that's the use of $student->value rather than $student itself. If one uses $student, then the MathObject's fuzzy real comparisons will be used, so that values that are fuzzy-equal to 1 or 2 will be excluded (i.e., the check is really more like $x > 1+epsilon && $x < 2-epsilon). The difference would be whether you expect students to enter a computed value (a numeric formula) or to type a decimal directly. If it is a formula that they will be computing, you might want to use the fuzzy check, so that something that computes 1.99999 (but should have been 2 had it not been for round-off errors) will not be counted as correct, as it would when the non-fuzzy check it performed.

I'm not sure which I think is the right approach. It really depends on the problem, how you expect students to approach it, and how likely you think answers near the endpoints will be.

Davide