A Mad Lib is a word game invented by Leonard Stern and Roger Price.
If you are not familiar with them see Wikipedia.org's description.

Task Objective:
Create an web based Mad Lib story.

Educational Objectives:

• Develop communication skills.
• Learn how to handle form variables.

I've been working on the Student Line Grapher a lot lately and was doing some research to make sure that no one else had already created the same thing and I found this interesting program C.a.R - Compass and Rule. I believe that the audience is slightly different and the learning curve for C.a.R is harder than the Student Line Grapher but C.a.R also has a lot more features.

C.a.R. is dynamic geometry program. Basically, it simulates compass and ruler constructions on a computer. But on a computer, much more is possible. Check out the website for more details n what it can do. Since it is Java based you can even integrate it into your website or you can run it on your local computer.

While I was browsing the moodle.org website today I found an interesting program AutoScreenRecorder and there is even a free version available. I tried it out and it seemed to work pretty nicely. I appears to be similiar to Camtasia. I'll post some examples from it later.

The student line grapher can be easily integrated into a variety of activities. All that is needed is a javascript function that connects the graph to a form element. When the Student Line Grapher is used in a web page it accepts the following variables via the FlashVars parameter.

• qid=
  The name of the form element where the answer should be stored.
• answer=
  The equation that should be on the graph when the flash module starts. See the special equation format below.

When the student draws a line the JavaScript function flash_response(answer) is called. Answer will contains the name of the html element to store the answer and the value to store. This is delimited by a colon (:).

Equation/Inequality Format

The format of the equation is y-intercept or slope-intercept form, y = m*x + b. All elements of the equation are separated by a space. The values of the slope (m) and the y-intercept (b) is to the nearest thousandth decimal place and both can be negative numbers. Instead of using standard symbols for the equation the following were used to eliminate the need to encode and decode the < and > symbols.

Operation	Abbreviation
Equality (=)	eq
Greater than (>)	gt
Less than (<)	lt
Greater than or equal to (>=)	ge
Less than or equal to (<=)	le

For example the following equation y < -3x + 3 would be represented as y lt -3x + 3. The vertical line where x equals 3 would be x eq 3. The horizontal line where y equals 3 would be y eq 0x + 3.