Cockerel is a prover, a lesson planner, and a companion for all education in all areas of mathematics. My experience in mathematical education is only as a student, however it has shown me that no good tools exist for providing a long distance interactive experience. Students have to deal with a system the expects perfection and understanding without any feedback and little to no motivation beyond the threat of failure.
Cockerel is different. It provides an environment that is easy for instructors and students to use by focusing solely on lesson planning. Each class has a number of lesson plans associated with it. The lesson plan is simply a wiki document that instructors can use however they like. By providing any questions and proofs in-line with the instruction, students will have clear references for all their assignments. Additionally, each question or theorem, will be a clickable link to a prover in which the students can complete the questions.
The Cockerel system is simple to install provided you have the following requirements satisfied:
For information on installing these see their respective sites.
Since Cockerel is in a heavy development phase is it signficantly more reliable to install the system using the latest code on Github and activating a development enviroment. Future releases will be packaged for Ubuntu/Debian and PyPi, but until then follow these directions.
I strongly recommend using the virtualenv project for managing the install. Assuming you have satisfied the above pre-requisites you can create a new virtualenv around the project directory to install into. This can be done with:
git clone git://github.com/dcolish/Cockerel.git
Now you are ready to active the development branch using the following commands:
cd path/to/Cockerel
virtualenv dev_env
. dev_env/bin/activate
python setup.py develop
Begin activating your install:
cd path/to/Cockerel
. dev_env/bin/activate
Now you will have the commands required to run Cockerel and Coqd in your path. To start Cockerel run:
cockerel
To start Coqd run:
coqd
The Cockerel webpage will be at http://localhost:5000 by default. Note that both of these commands will run in the foreground of your terminal. If you do not want this they can also be run using a few shell commands to control the program output. In order to stop them you will eventually need to foreground them again and press Ctrl-C. A session could look something like this:
(dev_env)blackbox:Cockerel ∈ ζ cockerel > cockerel.log 2>&1 &
[1] 4199
(dev_env)blackbox:Cockerel ∈ ζ coqd > coqd.log 2>&1 &
[2] 4211
(dev_env)blackbox:Cockerel ∈ ζ jobs
[1]- Running cockerel > cockerel.log 2>&1 &
[2]+ Running coqd > coqd.log 2>&1 &
(dev)blackbox:Cockerel ∈ ζ fg %1
cockerel > cockerel.log 2>&1 #NOW PRESS Ctrl-C to stop
(dev)blackbox:Cockerel ∈ ζ fg %2
coqd > coqd.log 2>& #NOW PRESS Ctrl-C to stop