Hey there!
We have some exciting news! The CL team is taking a break for the summer and will be back in August for the new school year. We’re also changing the cadence of our newsletter. We’ll be sending you less of what you don’t need and more of what you do need, so starting this year, we’ll send out more comprehensive newsletters on a quarterly basis—August, October, January, and April (we’ll aim for the start of your school quarters). There will be a fifth bonus newsletter in June to kick off your summer!
In the meantime, here’s a collection of the tips and tricks that we shared during this year’s CL Day:
Counting variables
Combining substituteLatexVariable with countNumberUsage lets us count how many times a variable appears in an expression. Here's how it works:
- Count the number of 1s that appear in an expression.
- Use substituteLatexVariable to replace every x with a 1 in parentheses. E.g., (1)
- Count the number of 1s that appear in the new expression.
- Find the difference.
Take a look at a demo of it here. One place we may use it is to check if students have fully simplified an exponential expression. We'd love to know how you use this trick!
Recursive functions
Here’s a neat trick that lets us use evaluationFrames to evaluate recursive functions entered by students! Within an evaluationFrame, we can define a function that returns an element from a list:
