Making books of worksheets

What is a book of worksheets?

MapleVr4 has three features not present in previous releases. One can have multiple worksheets open at one time in a session. Also, one can insert bookmarks to paragraphs in a worksheet and hyperlinks to (bookmarks in) worksheets. The combined effect of these features is that one can link together collections of worksheets into a book of worksheets , so that once one of the worksheets has been opened, one can successively open other worksheets linked to it with the hyperlinks in that worksheet. For example, this worksheet is in a small book of worksheets, another of which is perls.mws . Clicking on the hyperlink will open up the worksheet perls.mws. You can insert a hyperlink with the insert menu above.

There are many ways to links books of worksheets together. The simplest structure is to have a table of contents worksheet , which contains a possibly annotated list of hyperlinks to the worksheets in the book, together with a hyperlink back to the table of contents in each worksheet. This way one can get from any worksheet in the book to any other worksheet by way of hyperlinks. So one can read the book by just opening any worksheet in the book, which leads to the table of contents worksheet, which then leads to all the other worksheets.

This small book of worksheets has a table of contents called toc.mws . Usually, I add a link back to a table of contents at the bottom of each worksheet in the book.

Although a table of contents worksheet is easily constructed by hand, it would be handy to have a way to construct one outside of Maple if you want to try out various combinations of worksheets. You can use a perl5 script mkcontents.pl which I wrote for this purpose.

mkcontents.pl

This perl5 script constructs a MapleVr4 worksheet which contains a list of hyperlinks to the worksheets in a collection of worksheets.

Usage:

1. perl -S mkcontents -h prints a short help message and exits.

2. perl -S mkcontents tocname fileofwkshts

where tocname is the name of the table of contents worksheet to be produced (eg toc.mws), and fileofwkshts is the file containing the names of the worksheets in the 'book', which are to appear as a hyperlink in tocname .

In order to use this script, you will need to have perl5 installed on your machine. Perl5 comes on the Chisel disk.

Of course, additional hyperlinks can be inserted into the book as you read it and make notes to yourself. It is easy to add a worksheet to the book. Just put a link to the table of contents worksheet and then add a line to the table of contents containing a link the to new worksheet. This way you can grow your own book as the semester wears on.

Bookmarks

Now, how can we use the capability of making bookmarks in a worksheet? In any paragraph in the worksheet, one can have one bookmark. The way to insert a bookmark is to choose Edit in the Bookmark option of the View Menu (Just below Zoom). A separate window opens up and one can see what to do from there. I have inserted two bookmarks in this worksheet already. When you click on a bookmark, the cursor goes to the paragraph which contains that bookmark. So if you have a long worksheet, you can use the bookmarks to navigate around in the worksheet.

Bookmarks are useful to the reader of a book of worksheet in at least two ways. First if the writer has inserted any bookmarks the reader can use them to guide his reading. Second the reader can insert his own bookmarks to help him locate a particular paragraph in the worksheet later. Since the reader of a worksheet is often the writer of the worksheet (or one of them), the same remarks apply to him.

One feature of hyperlinks that we haven't mentioned is that the link can actually take the cursor to a paragraph marked by a bookmark in the worksheet. This enables one to use bookmarks in constructing an index worksheet for a book of worksheets. Such a worksheet would consist of an alphabetized list of all of the bookmarks in the book of worksheets. Each item in the list is equipped with a hyperlink to the paragraph in the worksheet marked by the bookmark. So when you click on an item in the index, the worksheet containing the bookmark is opened up and the cursor is placed at the top of the paragraph which contains the bookmark.

Index worksheets would be very cumbersome to construct by hand, althought it could be done. I have a perl5 script which accomplishes this task quickly.

mkindex.pl

This perl5 script produces a MapleVr4 worksheet which contains a sorted list of all bookmarks in a collection of worksheets. These bookmarks are linked to the appropriate worksheet, thus giving an active index. Also, the index worksheet contains a link to a 'table of contents' worksheet. This enables one to construct an index worksheet to a 'book of worksheets'.

Usage :

1. perl -S mkindex -h prints a short help message and exits.

2. perl -S mkindex indexname tocname fileofwkshts

where indexname is the name of the index worksheet to be produced (eg index.mws), and tocname and fileofwkshts are as in mkcontents.

For examples of complete books of worksheets, see Visual Problem Solving with Maple by Paul Eakin and Carl Eberhart, and the Problem Solving with Maple: A handbook for calculus , by Carl Eberhart. Both of these are on the Chisel Disk.

We think there is a lot of potential in the idea of a book of worksheets.

Table of contents