Activities-Hot Potatoes QuizThe Hotpot module (Hot Potatoes Quiz)

With this tool exercises created with the Hot Potatoes program (as well as Textoys exercises) can be embedded in Moodle as graded activities using the Moodle gradebook, provided they have been saved as version six exercises. Teachers who are unfamiliar with the Moodle Quiz tool, but who know the Hot Potatoes programme, can use this to create quizzes, without having to go into the details of the Moodle Quiz tool (In fact this is a neat module that has some functionality that is not available in the quiz module). The school has licenses for the latest versions of the Halfbaked Software programs, so that compatibility will be optimal.

When you wish to create an embedded Hot Potatoes (hotpot) exercise, you first need to create the exercise using the Hot Potatoes program (see previous chapter) and make sure that you save the so-called mother file (XML file) for version 6 browsers. Check it out properly to see that it works and that all information and feedback given is correct. It is especially important that the instructions in the hotpot exercise are in accordance with its use as a Moodle-integrated quiz! (You should for example mention the number of attempts the students get to complete the quiz and warn them against peeking.) Then you can upload it to the course files folder of your course.

To integrate the hotpot file in your course, turn on the editing mode and select Hot Potatoes Quiz from the Activities drop down list.

The following settings screen will open:

In teacher view a finished Hot Potatoes quiz could look something like this:

Hot Potatoes Self-test ExercisesContents:

Introduction General description JQuiz (Configuration) JQuiz (Questions) JCloze JMatch JCross

Introduction

Hot Potatoes is not a part of Moodle, but Moodle has several tools that can import or embed Hot Potatoes exercises in Moodle; hence, it being included in this manual. Hot Potatoes is the best known shareware from Half-Baked Software (based at the University of Victoria in Canada). It is a program that allows you to make six different types of self-test exercises. These exercises can help to make web-based learning content more interactive. Experience shows that study pages with self-test exercises attached draw more ‘hits’ from the students and the students spend more time per hit on those pages (and hopefully will learn more during that time). Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences have been working with Hot Potatoes since 1998.

Hot Potatoes (a.k.a. hotpots) was originally meant to create language exercises, and some hotpots (like jumbled sentence) have little use otherwise. However, most hotpots can be used for any kind of subject.

Hotpots are shareware. That means you can freely download the program from the Internet (at http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/hotpot/ ). The unregistered version allows only limited use of the program (enough to learn how to use it). If you wish to use the full version, you need to register. Even the registration is free, but if you wish to use your hotpots in a closed web environment (like Moodle), you need a licensed registration key. Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences presently have licenses for both version 5 and 6 of Hot Potatoes. If you wish to enrich your course study content with self-test exercises, contact the eLearning Centre.

NB: Halfbaked Software offers more educational programs, e.g. Quandary, which is described concisely in the next chapter of this manual.

General description

Hotpots are made in two steps. First, you create the so-called ‘mother file’ which has a hotpot XML extension (like .jcw or .jcl). This file is useless without the hotpot program (except for use in the Hot Potatoes Quiz module in Moodle, see the previous chapter in this manual), but with the motherfile you create the self-test exercises (which have the HTML extension .htm). These exercises you can display anywhere on the Web, including in Moodle and they usually work fine (Presently, the TEX filter in Moodle causes a problem with version 6 crossword and jumbed sentence exercises, but work is being done to solve that issue. In the meantime you are advised to use version 5 crosswords and jumbled sentence exercises).

Hotpots is a really flexible program. The hotpot exercises work independently from other programs (you only need a browser). However, the eventual success of the exercises depends very much on their conception. The thinking before you make the exercise and the attention paid when you create the mother file are the most important in the process!

Before creating a hotpot exercise, you need to think about what you want to achieve with it. Do you want students to train vocabulary then the gap text (JCloze) or the Short answer quiz (JQuiz) are the best choices. Do you wish to test text comprehension, the multiple choice (JBC) or matching (JMatch) exercises are more suitable.

When you have selected the right hotpot, you need to take into consideration its possibilities:

Multiple choice questions can be used for any subject. They are most effective when they give good feedback to the students (why is an answer wrong/correct).

Short-answer Quiz questions are good in combination with sound clips, definitions or gap sentences, but we must keep in mind that there can be only one answer (and if there are more correct answers we must include all of them!). Therefore translation exercises are not a good choice, because there are often many possible correct translations.

Crosswords bring a playful element into your study material, but they need to contribute something (like testing knowledge or having students train certain skills). The quality of the clues determines much of the success.

Matching exercises can be used in any situation where understanding of a subject can be expressed in the combination of two objects or phrases. It is possible to combine for example pictures with explanations (provided the pics are small and the explanations not too long. The drag and drop version (DHTML) looks nice but works only with certain browsers!).

Cloze texts can be used for any type of fill in exercises, with or without wordlist at the top and with or without extra clues given. Students are trained in understanding as well as spelling. Cloze texts must not be too long (especially not, if they have a wordlist at the top; avoid too much scrolling!)

The jumbled sentence exercise is suitable only for language learning and even there in a limited way. It is not described in this manual.

The instructions for the students must always be very clear (in all exercises) about what is expected of them. You must therefore always check the instructions per question (JBC, JQuiz) and the general instructions.

When you have finished with the mother file, you save it, and then you can create the self-test exercise, which you will save under the same name as the mother file (so that you can easily find which ones belong together. You always check the hotpot for bugs, spelling errors or other things you may have overlooked, like the colour setting (colours should support and not distract from the exercise; soft, light colour combinations are best). When you make changes, you must do that in the mother file, save it again and create the self-test exercise again (you can overwrite the previous one, if it was flawed).

Hotpots are easy to create. The interface can be turned into Finnish and a number of other languages (In the interface, select Options -> Interface -> Load interface file and select the language of your choice). The self-test exercises enrich the learning material and are often appreciated by the students (just reading text on-line is boring), as long as you do not overdo it.

JQuiz

JQuiz is the most commonly used Hot Potato. In Hot Potatoes 6 JQuiz combines the functionality of JBC and JQuiz from version 5, allowing for the creation of hybrid exercises that contain both question types (multiple choice and short-answer) as well as a new hybrid question type. As always, when creating a hotpot, you start by configuring the output of the exercise ( ). The output configuration screens are quite similar in the different hotpots so we will go through them in detail once, for JQuiz, and show only the main screens for the other hotpots.

The first output configuration screen you see is this:

The main thing to pay attention to here is to provide clear instructions to the students. Note that if you have used this tool before and saved the configuration, the same settings (including the instructions!) will appear when you open the tool to make another exercise. Hence, you should always check the output configuration!

The second tab of the configuration window allows you to provide text for different functions. If you want to make an exercise in another language than used in the present configuration, you will have to translate these strings (and you might want to save your translation as a separate configuration file for later use):

The Buttons tab allows you to change the language strings for different buttons (The size of the button will change with the length of the string). The points to check on this page is that the "Show Answer" button is not selected and that the navigation bar is equally disabled (unless you wish to connect your hotpot to another, but when using the hotpots in combination with Moodle tools that will be rarely the case).

The Appearance tab allows you to set the colour scheme of the hotpot exercise. Keep in mind that dark text on a light background, with sufficient contrast, is best for online use. Choose preferably warm soft and harmonious colours.

The Timer tab can be skipped since the idea of a timer generally defeats the idea of a self-test exercise. The Other tab is different for each hotpot type (see examples further down). It concerns settings specific to the exercise type. For JQuiz the following settings are advised:

The two remaining tabs can be ignored. They deal with the kind of customisation that is not required for our intended use with Moodle. You can save the settings (or save them as a separate configuration file if you intend to use the same settings again later) and click OK.

Now you are ready to start creating the questions of the JQuiz exercise.

You can move to the next question, just like moving to the next answer box, by using the arrows next to the question number. Note that you can choose the question type for each question in the exercise, so one JQuiz hotpot can contain four question types! Apart from questions and answers, you may enrich the exercise by adding pictures and/or sound files to the questions, or to a reading text ( ) that can accompany the questions.

Once you have finished making your questions (and adding extra material where required), you can save your mother file ( i.e. the hotpot XML file, in this case with the extension .jqz). This motherfile you can use to create a Hot Potatoes Quiz in Moodle using the integrated module (see the previous chapter in this manual). With the mother file saved you can create the stand-alone exercise ( with the extension .htm). It is advisable to give it the same filename as the motherfile

and, initially, to save it in the same location (for all relative links, if any, to function correctly). The question displayed above could look something like this in a finished hotpot:

Adding pictures to the hotpot, as seen in the above example, can enrich, clarify or even be the core of a question. Pictures are added via the picture window that pops up when you click the icon to add a picture from file ( ).

The picture link will be inserted at the spot where you had placed your cursor. Note that in the above example the link URL to the picture is relative (i.e. the picture file is located in the same folder as the mother file). If this is not the case, the tool will create absolute links to the picture file, i.e. the link URL will contain folder names that make it difficult for you to move the exercise to

Moodle (You will have to edit the exercise HTML file to replace the incorrect links with correct Moodle links). It is also possible to add a hotlink to a picture online, but that can be problematic for other reasons.

To round off the description of the JQuiz hotpot, here is a view of how to make a hybrid question:

JCloze

JCloze is the Hot Potato module with which you can create gap-text exercises. Gap texts, a.k.a. cloze texts, are quite suitable for vocabulary and text comprehension training, but they can be adapted to other uses as well. For obvious reasons a JClose exercise is not so suitable for combination with a reading text as JQuiz. In addition, the task cannot be divided over several pages as it can be in JQuiz.

When you have your text in the window, you can select one by one the words you wish to turn into gaps with the mouse and click the Gap button. It is also possible to use the Auto-Gap button, but then you probably have to edit the gapped words that the program has chosen (put the cursor on the gapped word and click the Show Words button to bring up the same editor as when you gap a word).

You can also remove erroneous gaps by clicking the Clear Gaps button (removes all gaps from the text), or by selecting individual gapped words and clicking the Delete Gap button. When you have finished creating gaps, you must, as always, check the output cofiguration to be sure the instructions, text strings and other output relate to the exercise you are making. Most of the screens are very similar to those for JQuiz, so here are only the ones that clearly differ:

Once you have adapted and saved the output configuration you can save the motherfile and then export it as a web page to create the self-test exercise. The above example cloze text (without word list ot multichoice gaps) could look someting like this:

Naturally, there are many variations possible, for example, by adding pictures or sound files to the text.

JMatch

JMatch allows for the creation of extensive matching exercises, including drag and drop types. Unlike in JQuiz (where a list of questions can be created) only one task can be created per mother file and it is displayed on one page. Just as with JCloze and JCross, JMatch is not so suitable for combination with a reading text, because this would in many cases complicate the display of the task. The interface window for a JMatch task looks like this:

A matching exercise expects student to match items in one list to items in another list, so that a correct list of matching pairs is established. The items can be words (e.g. synonyms or names), or definitions, or even pictures. As a general rule. The longer phrase should be in the leftt hand list, while the shorter phrase can be in the (jumbled) right hand list (so as to ensure the exercise displays well). A matching exercise must not be too long. The longer the list of items is, the more difficult the exercise becomes. In addition the longer the list the greater the risk of display

difficulties, especially in drag and drop versions. It may even block the students from completing the exercise! If the list is long (i.e. if it doesn't fit on one page), you should limit the items shown on the page of the exercise. This can be set in the output configuration:

With the above configuration the items are randomly chosen from the ones you created, so that a different set is displayed every time (like in this drag and drop example). Note that, using additional code written by Michael Rottmeier, you can use JMatch to create different exercise types like JMemory.

JCross

JCross allows you to make online crossword puzzles. This exercise type is often seen as challenging and refreshing by students and it can be used for example as a "treasure hunt" exercise in which students are given a keyword, or a link, etc. when they complete the puzzle correctly. Note that the hotpot HTML code in JCross version 6 exercises is not compatible with the TEX filter in Moodle. So, if you want to use JCross to make stand-alone self-test exercises for Moodle, you should use version 5 of the Hot Potatoes program (which allows you to save both version 5 () and 6 exercises). The interface is practically the same for both versions of Hot Potatoes apart from

this option. Note that the code problem only affects the .htm file, not the .jcw XML file (the mother file) that you would use to create a Hot Potatoes Quiz in Moodle.

To create a crossword you need to create a grid of interlinking words, and add a clue (translation, definition, description, or synonym) for each. The interface for JCross (version 6) looks like this:

When you have created a grid of interlinking words (manually or with the autmatic option), you must add clues for each word in the puzzle. When you click the button, the following window will pop up listing the words of the puzzle and you can fill in the clue for each one as shown below:

Whe you have saved your clues, you need to check your output configuration to ensure that your instructions and language strings conform to the purpose of your exercise:

Note that a crossword is not suitable to be created with a reading text alongside, since this will most often squeeze the puzzle in too small a space on the page. If you wish to have a reading text with a crossword attached, create the text in Moodle and link to the crossword from the text, as with this example crossword.

Finally, if this short manual did not meet your needs, note that there are many online tutorials available in several languages. Also note that the Hot Potatoes site offers resources that can be used in combination with Hot Potatoes like code to create even more exercise types and a free clip art library hosted by the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre.