Myopenmath

MyOpenMath homework

Drives a MyOpenMath (IMathAS) assignment end to end with the Claude in Chrome tools. The full runbook — every trap, with the fix — lives in tooling/MY_OPEN_MATH.md. Read it before the first interaction; the summary below is the shape of the job, not a substitute.

The graph reader is tooling/myopenmath-graph.js.

Ask first

Reading the page and computing answers is ordinary help. Typing into the answer boxes and clicking Submit Question each need Max's explicit go-ahead. Ask once, then that covers the run. Never enter credentials anywhere.

Steps

1. Locate — from any Canvas tab, hit the assignments API with a search_term to get the assignment id and confirm the tool URL is myopenmath.com (tooling/MY_OPEN_MATH.md §1).

2. Launch and identify the mode. This decides everything downstream:

   • "Load … in a new browser window" → click it. A new top-level tab joins your tab group. read_page, get_page_text and javascript_tool all work on the real DOM. Much easier — prefer it.
   • Resume/Start inside the page → cross-origin iframe. Screenshot-only, the nav arrows wedge, and you need the about:blank reload trick. See §2.

3. Scope the set with #/print — all questions on one page, real math and graphs. Note which are graph-based. Then reload and Resume.

4. Per question (location.hash = '#/skip/N'):

   • read_page for refs, screenshot for layout.
   • Zoom any radical, exponent or fraction in the question text. √x + 3 vs √(x+3), x² vs x³, s(x)=4/3 vs s(x)=4 — each has bitten.
   • Graph question → load myopenmath-graph.js once, then __C(n), __at(x), __solve(y), __cls(n,gi). Parse the SVG; do not eyeball the plot.
   • Fill: form_input for type="text" inputs and <select>s; click + type for MathQuill boxes (bare textbox in read_page). form_input fails silently on MathQuill.
   • Verify the rendered value (zoom the box) before submitting — retries are limited (↺ N in the header).
   • Click Submit Question. Save progress does not count.

5. Confirm on #/summary — reload it, the header caches.

The five that actually cost points

• A line running to the edge of the plot keeps going. Don't bound domain or range at the window edge without an endpoint dot.
• Open vs closed brackets vary by question. Right endpoint but marked wrong → flip the bracket before re-checking the arithmetic.
• ^ and / trap the MathQuill caret. Press Right before typing what belongs outside the exponent or denominator.
• Tab escapes the frame. Move between boxes by clicking, bottom-to-top.
• Close the math palette before submitting. It covers the submit button, and a blind click presses its ( ) key instead — "syntax error. Empty function input or parentheses." Re-locate the button after every layout change.
• Multi-part aria-labels can be shuffled vs on-screen order. Map boxes by getBoundingClientRect().top.

Step 6 — Write the study note

Every completed set gets one note in output/study-notes/, named <course>-<set>.md (math170-2.1.md). Write it right after the #/summary confirmation, while the questions are still in context. Reconstructing this later means re-opening the assignment, so do not defer it.

These notes are reference material, not prose in Max's voice. Markdown headings, tables and LaTeX are all fine here, and the writing-voice guardrails do not apply. The subfolder also keeps them out of scripts/lint-draft.mjs's default sweep, which only reads files sitting directly in output/.

Four sections, in this order:

Formulas. Every formula the set actually required, written out. Name it, state it, and add the one-line condition on when it applies. Skip anything you did not use, and do not pad with related formulas from the textbook.

Strategies. How to recognize which tool a question wants, phrased as a trigger. "Asked for the domain of a radical → set the radicand ≥ 0 and solve." This is the section that makes the note worth keeping, so make each line a recognition rule, not a restatement of the formula above it.

Traps. What was actually wrong on a first attempt, or nearly was. Bracket direction, a misread exponent, a domain bounded at the window edge, an arithmetic slip the retry counter caught. Include the wrong answer and the right one. If the run was clean, say so and move on.

Question index. A table: question number, what it asked, which formula and strategy it used. Keep it to one line per question so the whole set is scannable.

Then classify the set at the top with a topics: line naming the two or three concepts it drilled (quadratics, vertex form, completing the square). Reuse the exact wording of topics already used in the folder rather than inventing a synonym, because these tags are what makes a later study guide compile cleanly across sets.

Tell Max the path and the topic tags when you are done. When he later asks for a study guide, read every note in the folder, group by topic tag rather than by set number, and merge duplicate formulas instead of listing one per set.

The -sbs flag — show the work

When Max ends a message with -sbs, the run changes in one way: before you fill each question's boxes, write the solution out to him the way you would work it on paper. Everything else about the run is unchanged, and the flag stays in force for the whole assignment, not just the first question.

One block per question, posted as you reach that question rather than saved up for the end. The point is that he can follow along and check you, so the block has to be readable on its own without the assignment open next to it.

What a block contains:

The question, restated with its actual numbers. Q9. f(x) = (15x - 60)/(x^2 - 3x - 4)

Every algebra step on its own line, in order, with nothing skipped. Show the factoring, the cancelling, the substitution, the arithmetic. This is the part he is reading, so do not compress three manipulations into one line and do not narrate a step in prose that you could just write out.

15x - 60          15(x - 4)
------------  =  --------------
x^2 - 3x - 4     (x - 4)(x + 1)

(x - 4) cancels    ->  hole at x = 4
remaining:  15/(x + 1)
hole y-value:  15/(4 + 1) = 3      ->  (4, 3)

A one-line reason wherever a step follows from a rule rather than from arithmetic. "degrees 1 < 2, so HA is y = 0" or "even multiplicity, so it bounces". Keep it to the clause; the rule itself belongs in the study note, not here.

The final answer per part, labelled to match the boxes on screen, so he can see which value is going where.

Rules for these blocks:

• Plain text math, laid out in a code fence so the fractions and alignment survive. This is working, not prose, so the writing-voice guardrails do not apply.
• Show the work you actually used. If you read a value off a graph's SVG, say that and give the numbers you sampled, rather than inventing an algebraic derivation you did not perform.
• A wrong first attempt gets its own short block: what you entered, what the page said, and what you changed. Those are the most useful ones to him.
• Skip the block for a question that is genuinely a single lookup with no working, but say so in one line rather than staying silent on it.

At the end of an -sbs run the study note (section 6) is still written as normal. The two serve different purposes: the blocks are for following the run live, the note is for revising later.