Presentation of equations in Studio and the data stream

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This sim displays equations in a number of places. There is one or more equations above the balance scale, and zero or more equations in the Snapshots accordion box. Examples:

There is currently nothing in Studio or the data strem that presents these equations in a human-readble format, or even a format that is easily parsed by a program. Is something like that needed? If so, what is the desired format? Where should it appear in the Studio tree?

[catherinecarter]

We talked about this issue today (the fact that each equation has to be personally laid out by the developer). We brought up Latex, which includes a math equation parser, that's not currently in any of the sims. Being new, I'm unclear whether building in Latex is either wanted or possible.
In terms of the studio tree, I'm going to defer to Amanda since I'm still learning studio and I'd like to learn how she'll answer this question so I can answer more intelligently next time.

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This is a little different than how the equations are rendered, and certainly smaller in scope.

I was thinking we might want a Property for each equation, whose value is a plaintext string. For the examples in the above screenshots:

"3x > 2"
"2x > 1"
"3x > 2"
"-x = -18"
"-x = -18"
"-x + 3 = -15"
"-x + 2 = -16"

But I'm not sure if those would really be useful, whether they would need to be parsable by wrappers/programs, etc.

[amanda-phet]

Discussed 11/8/22: Decision is to use a text string that a program could parse. This is closer to what the model knows, is human-readable, and is parsable by a program.

Examples:

"1 cat + 2 dog + 3 turtle > 0 cat + 1 dog + 0 turtle"

"1/10 x + 3/10 = 2/10 x + -5/10"

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More notes from 11/8/22 design meeting:

• delimiter used in string representation will be space ' '
• terms whose coefficient or value is 0 will always be present in the string
• number of terms on each side of the equation is equal to the number of TermCreators

• string representation will be available via the following PhET-iO-only Properties:
  • balanceScale.equationProperty: Property<string>
  • snapshot*.equationProperty: Property<string>
  • level*.challengeEquationProperty: Property<string>
• make the relational operator available via balanceScale.relationalOperaterProperty, derived from balanceScale.angleProperty

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Equality Explorer is not currently a publication priority, and it's unclear who will be continuing with PhET-iO instrumentation. So unassigning.