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STACK Professionals' Network: Meeting on 8 May 2025

Participants

  • Marc Peterfi
  • Tim Lowe
  • Jonas Lache
  • Matthias Geissbuhler
  • Jesus Copado
  • Florian Lindemann
  • Zuma Zevick
  • George Ionita
  • Sam Fearn
  • Edmund Farrow
  • Hayden Maudsley-Barton
  • Konstantina Zerva

Updates from members

  • Konstantina has 2 interns to work during summertime to create more content for the HELM workbooks.
  • Edmund is currently working a bit more on GitSync. On the STACK side he is working on finding a way to save broken questions and dealing with editor issues. These 2 features may be included in the next version of STACK.
  • Tim and Hayden gave us an update about the offline STACK guide and adding more preamble about Maxima.
  • Jonas has developed some more German language video tutorials about some features of STACK.
  • Jesus gave an update about ILIAS status. They released the latest STACK version in May, which is Stack 9.4 for ILIAS 9. They are now working on ILIAS 10 version.
  • Juma is attending the African STACK conference in Ethiopia this summer.
  • George informed us about the the 1st meeting of the Swiss STACK users that took place in Zurich.

Items discussed

International STACK Conference in Kenya 2026.

Trying to find budget for people to attend the Kenya STACK conference. Foe people in the UK the LMS (London Mathematical Society) has a mathematics in Africa scheme for a little bit which would cover travel to Africa for maths related events. So that's a Grant scheme worth looking at: https://www.lms.ac.uk/grants/mathematics-in-africa Investigate if there are any grant schemes the organisers could apply to, to try to subsidize travel for some number of people.

STACK professionals in-person meeting in Spain - early 2026.

Jesus proposed to have a meeting of the STACK professionals network at the beginning of next year (January until March) in Spain. The Surlabs we are willing to organize it. If we are less than 20 people, we can do the meeting in the office of Surlabs. If we are more than 20 people then the Town Council will let us use a community space for free.

STACK seminar in Trieste - May 2026.

The University of Trieste got an Erasmus funding to invite 5 colleagues from different universities in Africa to come over to Trieste for an exchange program. That would be a very good opportunity to also sort of set up a STACK seminar because STACK is still very new in Italy and most universities don't know about it. The tentative days are 27-29 of May 2026.

STACK seminars next term: online seminars for specific feature of STACK.

Investigate of who would like to be a volunteer and how to advertise them. Here is a document where we can add topics we would like to learn more about

Feature request - bulk test automaticaly add TO-DO blocks:

More details here: https://github.com/maths/moodle-qtype_stack/issues/1498.
When you run the bulk tester it adds TO_DO blocks to the question description, saying, "What is broken". The code is “done”, but do we actually want this feature? Are there any other ‘process’ improvements we can make? All agreed that this seems a useful feature to have.

Oter Features requested:

  • Have a way to know which version of Maxima is used on the server.
  • Have a preview button at the top so when we save the questions we don't need to scroll all the way down to preview it.

Date for next meeting:

Thursday 25th September 13.00 pm UK.

Note: this meeting was recorded and the video was shared with the members of the Network.