In this blog post we will talk about creating quizzes in a freeware application called Hot Potatoes and then importing them in Moodle for the purpose of assessing students' knowledge.
Let's begin by first saying a few words about 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." For more information and for downloading Hot Potatoes visit the official website: http://hotpot.uvic.ca/
Creating a quiz in Hot Potatoes
1. Open Hot Potatoes. You should see the Hot Potatoes main window displaying 6 choices: JQuiz, JCloze, JCross, JMatch, JMix. For information on each of these types, consult the help menu within Hot Potatoes.
2. Select the JQuiz option. See Figure 1 below:
Figure 1: Selecting JQuiz from the Hot Potatoes interface
The interface of JQuiz is very intuitive. All you have to do is type the question, write the possible answers and check marking the one that is correct. For this example we are going to create a Multiple-choice question.
3. Type the question in the Question box. See Figure 2 below:
Figure 2: Typing the question in JQuiz
4. Type the answers to the Multiple-choice question and check mark the correct answer. See Figure 3:
Figure 3: Typing the answers and selecting the correct answer
Once you are done with the first question you can add more questions by clicking on the up arrow next to the question number. Once you press the up arrow, a blank form similar to the first question will appear. To go back to any questions previously created simply click the down arrow. See Figure 4:
Figure 4: Changing the question in JQuiz
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 to add as many Multiple-choice questions as you need.
When you are done adding questions, go to File, click Save, type-in a name in the File name box and make sure the Save as Type is JQuiz files (*.jqz). Click Save.
Importing the Multiple-choice quiz in Moodle
1. Log-in to your Moodle course where you would like to add the quiz
2. Turn Editing On from the upper right-hand corner in Moodle.
Figure 5: Turning Editing on in Moodle
3. Go to the section of your course where you would like to add the quiz. For example, I added my quiz in the "19 July - 25 July" week. Click the Add an activity ... drop down menu and select Hot Potatoes Quiz.
4. Click Choose or Upload a file ...
5. Click Upload a File and from the following window click Choose File
6. Browse to the location on your hard drive of your quiz select it and click Open
7. To upload the selected file click on Upload this file. If everything went well, you should see your Hot Potatoes Quiz being uploaded to the server. You should expect to see something similar to Figure 6:
Figure 6: the Hot Potatoes quiz uploaded to Moodle
8. Click the Choose option right next to the Hot Potatoes quiz. You should see it in Figure 6.
9. You are now taken back to the main menu entitled Adding a new Hot Potatoes Quiz. Read through the other options that are available. For the purpose of this tutorial, we went with the default settings and clicked Save and return to course.
At this point you should see your quiz added to your course. Here is what ours looks like:
Figure 7: The quiz added to the Moodle course
If you would like to see how the quiz works, you can change your role to a student and then clicking on the quiz and answering the questions.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact us at the STA Office, e-mail sta-help@trincoll.edu or by phone at x2589.
