Hot Potatoes Web Authoring Tools

http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked

The Hot Potatoes suite is a set of six authoring tools, created by the Research and Development team at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre. They enable users to create interactive web-based exercises of six basic types. The exercises that present formative assessment use JavaScript for interactivity, and will work in Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer versions 4 and above on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. Two of the tools, JMatch and JMix, can also produce DHTML-based drag-and-drop exercises, but these will only work with more recent browsers. The authoring tools will also handle accented characters, so users can create exercises in any language based on the Roman character set, including French, German, and many other languages.

Although the exercises are constructed using JavaScript, users don't need to know anything about JavaScript to use the programs. All they need to do is to enter their data -- texts, questions, answers etc. -- and the programs will create the web pages for them. Then users can post them on their web site. However, the programs are designed so that almost every aspect of the pages can be customised, so if they do know HTML or JavaScript, they can make almost any change they want to the way the exercises work or to the format of the web pages. For the test-takers, they are given immediate feedback on the correctness of an answer and can also be given hints and clues.

For a non-profit-making educational institution or context, and users who are prepared to share their exercises by placing them on a publicly accessible Web server, then they may use the Hot Potatoes suite free of charge. If users want to use passwords to protect their exercises or distribute them only on an Intranet, they will need to buy a licence.

The Hot Potatoes suite can support the following question types:

• Multiple choice
• Jumbled sentence
• Fill-in-the-blank
• Crossword type

System requirements

There are two Hot Potatoes versions available now. One is for Windows 95/98/ME/NT4/2000 system. The other is for Macintosh PowerMac/G3/G4 OS 8+. Meanwhile users require a Java-enabled browser such as Netscape’s Navigator 3 or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3 or above.

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