WorksheetMaker

WorksheetMaker was a series of applications written by Jim Waller, an American public middle school teacher, for the purpose of producing math worksheets. Over the program's nearly twenty-year history, the unique problem generation routines were ported from one platform and language to another as technology continued to develop. The first publicly available version of the software was released in 1981 for the TRS-80 Model 1's BASIC programming language and output to a dot-matrix printer. Later versions were written in Pascal, C++ and Java (specifically, J++) to run on the Apple II, IBM-PC (DOS), Macintosh and finally Windows. The latest complete version of WorksheetMaker was written in Microsoft J++ for Windows only, and could send its output directly to laser printers. Version numbers were rarely attributed to any particular release.

WorksheetMaker was distributed through bulletin board systems and eventually the early Internet. The program was almost always available for free as public domain software. When it was ported to MS-DOS for IBM computers it was distributed as shareware, but this scheme did not work out and it soon became public domain again.

The program was significant among the teaching community for its ability to create worksheets tailored to a particular use that rivaled or exceeded the quality that would have gone into a human-made worksheet. It did this by using artificial intelligence routines and expert systems that could generate problems that logically follow the ones that came before them, rather than by using a blatant random number generator.

The author, Jim Waller, retired from teaching in the mid-1990s but continued to develop the program for new platforms to take full advantage of object-oriented programming techniques. The move to J++ was well suited for this purpose but the language itself was unexpectedly killed by legal fights between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. To save his work, he had intended to move to a pure Java platform on the World Wide Web where worksheets could be created on the server and distributed through the PDF format. Before this could be achieved Jim Waller became ill and died in 2002.