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Contributing to mathsteps

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

Table of contents

What should I know before I get started?

  • code of conduct
  • decisions around how we built mathsteps
  • mathJS expression trees

Contributing

  • ways to help out
  • creating a pull request
  • testing
  • coding conventions

What should I know before I 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

overview of how (and why) we built mathsteps

mathJS expression trees

  • 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. e.g. 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 adding the negative, e.g. 2 - 3 would be 2 + -3 in the tree. This is so that all addition and subtraction is flat (e.g. 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'

Contributing

Ways to help out

  • You can 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 as much detail as you can so 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 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 assign yourself to the related issue on GitHub before you get started
  • if there is no existing issue for the change you'd like to make, you can make a new one
  • make sure all the unit tests pass (with npm test) before creating the pull request, and please add your own tests for what you changed as well. If you're not sure how to add tests or are confused about why tests are failing, it's also 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
  • If you want to see what the expression tree looks like at any point in the code, for debugging, you can log 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))

Coding conventions

  • mathsteps follows the node.js code style as described here.
  • To lint your code, run npm run lint .

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