After a super-human 11 month marathon since Alchemy was first approached by Heinemann, the Caribbean Maths Connect Teaching Resources CD-ROMs are complete and in production, in preparation for the beginning of the Caribbean school year in September. The CD-ROM comprises an electronic Teacher's Guide to accompany traditional hard-copy student textbooks in the leading Maths series.

Maths Connect has exceeded expectations, literally blowing away Heinemann and all the agents and teachers who've seen it and participated in piloting workshops. "We've already had a very large order of the books due to the CD-ROM," said Nigel Kelly, International Publishing Director of Harcourt Education in the UK, recently.

Maths Connect allows teachers to generate custom exercises and tests for their students. The teachers select the topics to be covered, and the number of questions of each type, and generate the worksheets and marking schemas in the formats they prefer: multiple-choice or "normal" questions, for example, and with customised school and grade names and other details.

The Maths Connect CD-ROM ships with almost 8 000 questions in it, but if teachers manage to work through all of these there's still hope: Alchemy has developed a question generation framework which is capable of generating an almost unlimited number of possible questions of various formats. This means that when Harcourt needs an updated version with new material no additional development or authoring is required to produce literally thousands of new questions.

In addition to the test and exercise questions there are hundreds of worksheets featuring discussion topics and tasks to both introduce students to new concepts and extend their understanding once the topics have been mastered, as well as a serchable glossary of terms from the textbooks.

Their are customised versions of the CD-ROM supporting the different curricula of Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, and a generic Caribbean version, all accessible from the same disc which means that printing and distribution is simplified. Forms 1 to 3 are covered.

The application runs from disc, which means no installation is required by the users.