2010 Information Technoloy Services

Concordia College, Moorhead, MN

June, 2010

Hot Potatoes Quizzes

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Creating Hot Potatoes Quizzes to

Use in Moodle

What is Hot Potatoes? The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is freeware, and you may use it for any purpose or project you like. It is not open-source.1 The purpose of 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 you do NOT need to know anything about these languages in order to use the programs. All you need to do is enter the data for your 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 Moodle classroom.1 Hot Potatoes is a third party program therefore Moodle does not provide technical support for it however tutorials are available on the Hot Potatoes website indicated below. The Hot Potatoes program must be downloaded and installed before you can add it as an activity in Moode. Information Technology Services at Concordia suggests using Hot Potatoes quizzes as part of a lesson activity, practice exercise, mechanism to facilitate student engagement with your Moodle classroom site, or as a non-graded learning activity until you are comfortable using this quiz program for graded work.

Downloading and Installing Hot Potatoes

Task 1: Log into Hot Potatoes Website

1. Navigate to http://hotpot.uvic.ca. 2. Locate the downloads section

a. PC users will click the Hot Potatoes 6.3 Installer link. If you’re using Firefox, the file will be saved to your downloads folder. In this folder look for a file called setup_hotpot_6304.exe. double-click this file to install accepting the default settings.

b. Mac users will click the Download Java Hot Potatoes link. 1

i. To install and run Java Hot Potatoes on Mac OS X:

1. Download the file javahotpot61.zip from the link above.

2. Unzip that file on your computer, you will have a folder called JavaHotPot6.

3. Drag the JavaHotPot6 folder to the Applications directory on your computer.

4. Open the folder and double-click the JavaHotPotatoes6 application icon.

5. Trash the javahotpot61.zip file.

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3. When you first start up Hot Potatoes, it will ask you for your user name. This name is stored on your computer and not sent to anyone; it will be inserted into your exercises to identify you as the author. You must provide a user name before you can use all the features of Hot Potatoes. 1

Types of Quizzes

Double click the Hot Potatoes icon on your desktop to launch the program. The following screen appears. This is where you begin creating Hot Potatoes quizzes. There are five basic quiz-making programs in the Hot Potatoes suite: 1

1. The JQuiz program creates question-based quizzes. Questions can be of four different types, including multiple-choice and short-answer. Specific feedback can be provided both for right answers and predicted wrong answers or distractors. In short-answer questions, the student's guess is intelligently parsed and helpful feedback to show what part of a 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. 1

2. 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 answer. 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 nth word in a text. 1

3. The JCross program creates crossword puzzles which can be completed online. You can use a grid of virtually any size. As in JQuiz and JCloze, a hint button allows the student to request a free letter if help is needed.1

4. The JMix program creates jumbled-sentence exercises. 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 next correct word or segment of the sentence if needed.1

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5. The JMatch program creates matching or ordering exercises. A list of fixed items appears on the left (these can be pictures or text), wth jumbled items on the right. This can be used for matching vocabulary to pictures or translations, or for ordering sentences to form a sequence or a conversation.1 The drag-and-drop output is in some ways much more effective than the standard output, in that it allows you to include pictures in both the left hand (fixed) items and the right-hand (draggable) ones. However, both types of output have their place. A drag-and-drop exercise can be very difficult to do if the page is too big for the user's screen; he or she will have to scroll around quite a lot, and may end up frustrated. The simpler standard output is much more effective if you want to include a large number of items on one page. We recommend using the drag-and-drop output only if you have fewer than 12 items, and preferably no more than eight. For exercises with more than 10 or 12 items, the standard output is usually better.2

6. In addition, there is a sixth program called the Masher. This is designed to create complete units of material in one simple operation. If you are creating sequences of exercises and other pages that should form a unit, you may find the Masher useful. The Masher can also be used to upload Web pages not created with Hot Potatoes to the www.hotpotatoes.net server.1

The next tasks will discuss how to create the five types of quizzes and finally you will learn how to upload and make the files available in Moodle.

General Notes

Within all quizzes you can use the Configuration icon in the toolbar to designate options while students take the quiz. Examples of options include:

Titles and instructions

Prompts and feedback

Button availability such as “Undo” and “Hint”

Background graphics

Timer

SCORM functionality

And more

After you’ve created a quiz in the Hot Potatoes program you save the file on your hard drive then choose Add an Activity in Moodle and upload the file. You will learn more detailed information about his process however we’ll first take a look at how you create each type of quiz.

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Creating a JQuiz

A JQuiz consists of multiple choice, short answer, hybrid, or multi-select questions. Task 1: To begin, launch the Hot Potatoes program and click the JQuiz link. The following window appears. (In the illustration below some data has already been filled in.)

Use this box to select different types of questions.

Click the up arrow to create another question.

Click this up arrow to reveal additional answer boxes.

TIPS: 1. Use the Save

icon in the toolbar to save your quiz file.

2. You can make new quizzes based from previously saved quizzes by selecting the “Save with a new name” icon in the toolbar.

TIPS: 3. Use the

Feedback section to coach students’ reasoning.

4. In the Settings column remember to check the box indicating the correct answer.

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Creating a JCloze Quiz

A JCloze quiz works like a fill-in-the-blank quiz. Task 1: To begin, launch the Hot Potatoes program and click the JCloze link. The following window appears. (In the illustration below some data has already been filled in.)

In this example a paragraph was typed and the vocabulary words “functional level” and “cross-functional teams” were selected. Task 2: To create the exercise you preselect a term or phrase and click the Gap button below. This creates the blank box students must fill in. When you create the gaps or fill-in-the-blank boxes, you can create hints for students and you can allow multiple variations of answers.

To delete a gapped word you must first select the word and click Delete Gap. Clear gaps will remove all the gaps plus any alternate correct words. Auto-gap automatically selects terms for you and creates gaps. You can use the Show Words button to provide hints or alternate acceptable selections for the chosen words. The final result (not shown) looks like a sentence with boxes where students must fill in the blank.

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Creating a JCross Quiz

The JCross quiz creates a crossword puzzle. You provide a list of terms and the puzzle is automatically created. Task 1: To begin, launch the Hot Potatoes program and click the JCross link. The window below appears:

Task 2: Click this button to input a list of words.

Task 3: Click Make the grid.

Task 4: On the crossword display grid add a title for your puzzle and then click the Add Clues button to input clues for each word. You will need to use the scrollbar to locate all the words. Note: the blue arrows below allow you to change the position of the puzzle. This is not recommended as some letters may be lost.

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Creating a JMix Quiz

The JMix quiz creates a jumbled sentence exercise. You type the correct sentence and the program jumbles it for you. Task 1: To begin, launch the Hot Potatoes program and click the JMix link. The window below appears (information has been filled in to illustrate):

In the quiz, students drag the boxed words and punctuation to the lined area above to structure the sentence. This is a popular quiz module for learning foreign languages.

Use the arrows to reveal additional alternate sentence options.

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Creating a JMatch Quiz

The JMatch program creates matching or ordering exercises. Task 1: To begin, launch the Hot Potatoes program and click the JCross link. The window below appears (data has already been filled in to illustrate). Note that the items in the left column are fixed. The items in the right column will be jumbled for the matching exercise.

1. Use this icon to insert a picture from a Web URL.

2. Use this icon to insert a picture from a file.

3. Use this icon to insert a link to a Web URL.

4. Use this icon to insert a link to a file on your hard drive.

1 2 3 4

During the quiz, students will drag items on the right to the step (or matching item) shown on the left.

Adding Hot Potatoes Quizzes to Moodle

Hot Potatoes quizzes are both an activity that you add and a file that you upload to Moodle. Follow these tasks:

Task 1: Add a Hot Potatoes quiz activity to Moodle while uploading the quiz file.

1. Make sure that editing is turned on in your Moodle site.

2. Locate the week or topic number and choose Add and Activity, Hot Potatoes Quiz

3. In the General section pictured below select “Choose or upload a file…” A dialog box appears to upload or select an existing file. (Steps 4 and 5 can be eliminated if you previously uploaded the quiz file to the Folders directory.)

4. Choose the button “Make a folder” and label the folder “Hot Potatoes Quizzes”. Choose Create.

5. Click on the new folder you just made and choose the “Upload a file” button. Browse to select the Hot Potatoes quiz from your hard drive. Choose “Upload this file.”

6. Your file will be listed in the dialog box. Select the “Choose” link to the right of the file name.

7. In the Display section note that you can solicit student feedback in a variety of ways such as a web page, forum, feedback form, or through Moodle’s messaging system. If you want students to move to the next quiz upon completion, you have an option to specify that.

8. The Access controls (next page) specify when the quiz will be available to students, whether you require a password to access the quiz, whether students can review the quiz, and how many times students take the quiz. As suggested previously, consider using Hot Potatoes quizzes for low-stakes or non-graded activities at first. If the quizzes will be completed for grades, you’ll want to adjust these settings.

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9. You can grade students on the highest grade, average of attempts, first or last attempt. Maximum grade refers to the points students can earn. Note when students make an attempt the Hot Potatoes quiz provides immediate feedback as a percentage. In order for students to see the numerical score students must visit the grade book and you must have the grade book programmed to display a number rather than a percentage.

10. When click reporting is enabled, a separate record is stored in the database each time a "hint", "clue" or "check" button is clicked. This allows the teacher to see a very detailed report showing the state of the quiz at each click. However, it may also mean that the size of the database grows very quickly, because several "click" records may be stored for each attempt at a quiz. 3

11. The Common Module Settings area allow you to specify whether you want your students to take the quiz as a group and to select from a pre-defined grade category for reporting grade results. It is not necessary to specify an ID number.

Task 2: Taking a Hot Potatoes Quiz

1. From your Moodle classroom page, select the link for the Hot Potatoes quiz. 2. Have fun.

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References and Sources 1. Taken directly from the following source: http://hotpot.uvic.ca retrieved June 28, 2010. 2. Taken directly from the following source: Hot Potatoes Help menu 3. Taken directly from the following source: Moodle Help menu