A simple Python program for creating a LaTeX document with fractional equations for elementary school students

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The goal of this program is to generate math problems for kids struggling with basic arithmetics and algebra. This program put my niece through her final years of elementary school by giving her 8 equations to solve every day.

Example

A sample output of the program, after linking the 'poczatek.tex' and 'koniec.tex' and compiling it with pdfLaTeX. The .tex and .pdf files for the example are in the repository.

Features

The equations contain simple fractions as well as decimals. In order to test the order of operations (PEMDAS) the program can generate paratheses around arbitrary number of fractions present in the equation. The math actions present in the equations consists only of addition, substraction, division and multiplication.

Usage

In order to generate the appropriate equations you need to run the following command:

python zadania.py > zadania.tex

An optional integer argument after zadania.py provides the seed for the RNG (in order to be able to control the randomness of the RNG). By default the program is seeded with the current day's number since 2018 and as such the default program will always generate the same equations throughout a single day unless a seed number is provided.

The next command should be to use to link the provided 'poczatek.tex' and 'koniec.tex' templates for a LaTeX document, that enable the pdfLaTeX compilation. The command can be:

cat poczatek.tex zadania.tex koniec.tex > output.tex

Finally, in order to compile the tex file you could run:

pdflatex output.tex