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Contributing to mathsteps

🎉 We're excited to have you helping out! Thank you so much for your time 🎉

Contents

Before you get started

Contributing

Before you get started

Code of Conduct

This project adheres to the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to mathsteps@socratic.org

How (and why) we built mathsteps

Read about how and why we built mathsteps on our blog.

Expression trees in mathJS

Most of this code iterates over expression trees to make step by step simplifications. We use mathJS expresison trees, which we recommend you learn a bit about.

There are a few different types of nodes that show up in the tree. This stepper uses OperationNode, ParenthesisNode, ConstantNode, SymbolNode, and FunctionNode. You can also read about them on the mathJS expressions documentation.

Keep in mind when dealing with these trees that child nodes are called different things depending on the parent node type. For example, operation nodes have "args" as their children, and parenthesis nodes have a single child called "content".

Tricky catch: any subtraction in the tree will be converted to an addition, by negating the number being subtracted, e.g. 2 - 3 would be 2 + -3 in the tree. This is so that all addition and subtraction is flat. For instance, 2 + 3 - 5 + 8 would become one addition operation with 2, 3, -5, and 8 as its child nodes. This is a common strategy for computer algebra systems but can be confusing and easy to forget. So at most points in the codebase, there should be no operators with - sign. If you're curious what the code that modifies subtraction looks like, you can find it in flattenOperands.js.

Coding conventions

mathsteps follows the node.js code style as described here.

To lint your code, run npm run lint .

Contributing

Ways to help out

  • Spread the word! If you think mathsteps is cool, tell your friends! Let them know they can use this and that they can contribute.
  • Suggest features! Have an idea for something mathsteps should solve or a way for it to teach math better? If your idea is not an existing issue, create a new issue with the label "enhancement".
  • Report bugs! If the bug is not an existing issue, create a new issue with the label "bug" and provide as many details as you can, so that someone else can reproduce it.
  • Contribute code! We'd love to have more contributors working on this. Check out the section below with more information on how to contribute, and feel free to email us at mathsteps@socratic.org with any questions!

Creating a pull request

We're excited to see your pull request!

  • If you want to work on something, please comment on the related issue on GitHub before you get started, so others are aware that you're working on it. If there's no existing issue for the change you'd like to make, you can create a new issue.

  • The best issues to work on are these issues that are not assigned or long term goals

  • Make sure all the unit tests pass (with npm test) before creating the pull request, and please add your own tests for the changes that you made. If you're not sure how to add tests, or are confused about why tests are failing, it's fine to create the pull request first and we'll help you get things working.

Testing

  • Make sure you properly unit-test your changes.
  • Run tests with npm test
  • Install Git hooks with npm run setup-hooks. This will add a pre-commit hook which makes sure tests are passing and the code is eslint-compliant.
  • If you want to see what the expression tree looks like at any point in the code (for debugging), you can log a node as an expression string (e.g. '2x + 5') with console.log(print(node)), and you can log the full tree structure with console.log(JSON.stringify(node, null, 2))

There's lots to be done, lots of students to help, and we're so glad you'll be a part of this.

Thanks! ❤️ ❤️

mathsteps team