Hot Potatoes
What Is It?
Hot Potatoes is a software product created by Half-Baked Software Inc. Hot Potatoes is a quizzing package and it allows you to quickly and easily create a variety of self-check quizzes in one of its six applications. When you open Hot Potatoes, you will be presented with a screen where you choose which "potato" you want to use:
The six applications include:
JCloze: (gap-fill exercises) JCloze exercises present students with a piece of text where certain words are left out. Students fill in the blanks for all the missing words, and then check all of their answers at one time. There is an option to provide a hint for each gap-fill term.
- See a sample exercise: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/wintutor6/jcloze1.htm
JMatch: (matching exercises) JMatch creates matching exercises, where there is a list on the left side and one on the right, and the student must match up the items on one side with the ones they match on the other. You can create the lists as standard drop-down lists, where the items on the right side are selected from drop-down lists. Alternatively, you can create drag-and-drop JMatch exercises.
- See a sample standard exercise: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/wintutor6/jmatch1.htm
- See a sample drag-and-drop exercise: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/wintutor6/jmatch2.htm
JQuiz: (question-based exercises) JQuiz allows you to make quizzes with multiple choice questions, short answer questions, multi-select questions, and hybrid questions, which are questions that start our as short answer but can change to multiple choice if the student submits the wrong answer a number of times.
- See a sample exercise: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/wintutor6/jquiz2.htm
JCross: (crossword puzzles) JCross is a tool for creating crossword puzzles. Creating the crossword is a two-step process- first, you type your terms out on the grid, then you must enter your clues for the terms.
- See a sample exercise: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/wintutor6/jcross1.htm
JMix: (jumble exercises) JMix creates jumble exercises, which are exercises where words in a sentence or letters in words are jumbled out of order. Students can either click on the words (or letters) to place them in proper order, or drag-and-drop them into the proper order.
- See a sample exercise: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/wintutor6/jmix1.htm
Additionally, there is The Masher, which allows you to link together learning units made from the different “potatoes” listed above, but in order to link any significant amount of material, you must purchase a license.
It is important to note that these quizzes are meant for student practice and self-evaluation—although the students are presented with immediate feedback and scores, the scores are not stored in a database anywhere, so there is no record of grades.
The software produces web pages coded in XHTML 1.1 and JavaScript. However, you do not need to know any code to create the exercises, you simply fill out form fields and the software creates the web pages. You will need to upload the files to a server though. You can choose to customize Hot Potatoes quizzes if you are familiar with HTML and JavaScript. You can also add a timer to any Hot Potatoes exercise. The image below shows the dialogue box for creating a Hot Potatoes JQuiz exercise.
Where Do You Get Hot Potatoes?
http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/index.htm; According to the Half-Baked website, Hot Potatoes is free of charge if “you work in a non-profit-making educational institution or context, and you are prepared to share your exercises by placing them on a publicly-accessible Web server.”
Best Practices
It is important to remember that Hot Potatoes exercises are “self-check,” which means that, although students are provided with an immediate score and feedback, that information is not saved in a database anywhere. So, Hot Potatoes is meant for student mastery practice rather than for formal assessment. Also, when writing questions, particularly for JCloze, JCross, and JMix, it is important to account for all possible correct answers. For example, you might create an exercise in JMix with a particular sentence in mind. However, once JMix creates the jumble, it might be possible that the jumbled words could form two different, and correct, sentences.
Tutorial
You can find short tutorials on all of the potatoes, as well as tips on how to write “good” questions, at: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/halfbaked/tutorials6.htm