Hot Potatoes : Interactive Educational Exercises

Hot Potatoes is a suite of six programs for creating interactive educational exercises for the World Wide Web. These are the programs included, along with the type of exercise they create :
JQuiz : multiple-choice, true-false, text-entry or short-answer quizzes
JCloze : gap-fill exercises
JCross : crosswords
JMix : jumbled-sentence exercises
JMatch : matching and ordering exercises
All of the exercise use JavaScript and HTML for their functionality.
We do not need to know JavaScript or HTML in order to use these programs – all you need to do is to enter your data (questions, answers etc.) and press a button, and the program will create Web pages for you automatically. It couldn’t be easier!
Hot Potatoes was created by: Stewart Arneil (Mac and Web programming), Martin Holmes (Windows and Web programming), Hilary Street (Graphics). Commercial aspects of Hot Potatoes (such as licencing) are handled by Half-Baked Software Inc: http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com
The purpose of the Hot Potatoes is to enable you to create interactive Web-based teaching exercises which can be delivered to any Internet-connected computer equipped with a browser. The exercises use HTML and JavaScript to implement their interactivity, but we do not need to know anything about these languages in order to use this program. All we need to do is enter the data for our exercises (questions, answers, responses, etc.), and press a button. The program will create the Web pages for you, and you can then upload them to your server.
There are five basic programs in the Hot Potatoes suite:
The JQuiz program creates questions-based quizzes. Questions can be of four different type, including multiple-choice and short-answer. Specific feedback can be provided both for right answers and predicted wrong answers or distractors. In short-answers questions, the student’s guess is intelligently parsed and helpful feedback to show what part of guess is right and what part is wrong. The student can ask for a hint in the form of a “free letter” from the answer.
The JCloze program creates gap-fill exercises. Unlimited correct answers can be specified for each gap, and the student can ask for a hint and see a letter of the correct answers. A specific clue can also be included for each gap. Automatic scoring is also included. The program allows gapping of selected words, or the automatic gapping of every with word in a text.
The JCross program creates crossword puzzles which can be completed online. You can use a grid of vitually any size. As in JQuiz and JCloze, a hint button allows the student to request a free letter if help is needed.
The JMix program creates jumbled-sentence exerxises. You can specify as many different correct answers as you want, based on the words and punctuation in the base sentence, and a hint button prompts the student with the text correct word or segment of the centence if needed.
The JMatch program creates matching or ordering exercises. A list of fixed items appears on the left (these can be pictures or text), with jumbled items on the right. This can be use for matching vocabulary to picture or translations, or for ordering sentences to form a sequence or a conversation.
There are there stages in creating exercises with these programs :
1. Enter your data
You type in questions, answers, feedback etc. which forms the basis of the exercise. See entering and saving data for more information on this.
2. Adjust the configuration
The “configuration” is a set information used to compile the Web pages. It includes instructions for the student, captions for navigation buttons, and other information which is not likely to change much between exercises. See configuring the output for more details.
3. Create your Web pages
This is simply a matter of pressing the “Export to Web” button on the toolbar. Choosing a file name, and letting the program do the rest. See creating Web page for further information.
When your data is ready, and you heve checked the configuration information, you are ready to create a Web page. Creating Web page is the simplest part of using Hot Potatoes. Use the create Web page commands, accessible through the file menu or the toolbar.
All of the Potatoes use the same command to create a single HTML file. You can post this file on your server, and the exercise will appear when you load it. If you are using JMix or JMatch, there are other options, however. JMacth has two other output type: one is flashcard output, which you can use to let your student practice or memorize something before quizzing them on it, and the other is drag-and-drop form of the exercise. JMix also has drag-and-drop format.
Choosing an output format
You should choose an output format based on the needs of your user, the type of material, and the kind of screen resolution you can expect your user to have. For example, if you are using JMatch, and you know some of your users have only 15” screens with a resolution of 800 by 600, don’t create drag-and-drop exercises with more than five or six items, because they won’t fit on screen: either use the “standard” non-drag-drop output, or make your exercises smaller by reducing the number of items in each exercise.
Creating and viewing your pages
When you selected the typeof output you want, and specified a file name, the Web page will be created. The program will then askyou if yaou wish to see the exercise in a browser. If you say yes, then your default browser program will be launched, and exercise will be loaded into it. You can check that the results match your expectations. This dialog box also gives you the option to upload your exercise to the hotpotatoes.net server.
Choosing good filenames
If you enter a file name containing a space, the program will warn you that this is not good idea; the reason for this that on many Web server, spaces will be replaced with “%20”, and therefore the URL of your document may not be what you expect it to be. It’s best to avoid spaces in the file and folder names of Web pages.
Finally, good luck to try Hot Potatoes program for creating interactive educational exercise. I hope you will be success! (on Maret, 28th, ­2008).****