Overview

The program Hot Potatoes, currently produced by Half-Baked Software, Inc., was designed to allow teachers to make interactive, Web-based exercises that can be accessed by students at any Internet capable computer terminal with a standard Web browser. Hot Potatoes uses both HTML and JavaScript;

However, one does not need to know these languages to make the Web-based exercises. Instead, teachers use the program's exercise templates to create exercises on Web pages which then can be uploaded to a server where students access them.

Hot Potatoes can create six different types of Web-based exercises which can stand alone or be linked to other exercises to form a sequence of tasks. Students can correct their own work based on the clues and feedback set up in advance by the teacher.

Description

Hot Potatoes is actually a software suite comprised of six different programs, or modules.

Each module can be used to create a different type of interactive, Web-based exercise.

The six different modules are referred to as "potatoes," and consist of :

JQuiz JMix JCross JCloze JMatch The Masher

The modules

Jcloze

JCloze is a traditional cloze or fill-in-the-blank exercise template which allows the teacher to type in a text of any kind (paragraph, ordered-sentences, etc.), and then choose the words be left blank for students to fill in.

Furthermore, a separate reading text can be entered (manually or from an HTML file) upon which the cloze-type questions can be based.

Examples - Jcloze

Examples - Jcloze

The modules

JquizJQuiz is used to create open-ended questions, which differ from

multiple-choice questions in that the student types the answer in a text-field, rather than choosing from a list of options.

JQuiz allow exercises to be programmed with an unlimited number of correct answers. For example, for the question "What is the capital of the United States?" the teacher can specify "DC," "D.C.,“ "Washington," and other versions of the name as correct answers.

Hot Potatoes also gives teachers the option of making answers case-sensitive, and of allowing students to see all correct answers by having a "Show Answer" button displayed.

Examples - Jquiz

The modules

JcrossJCross can be used to design crossword puzzles with customized puzzle

layout and optional clues for each word. The module begins with a blank grid template, and the teacher designs

the puzzle by entering the words directly into the grid, or by simply providing a list of words.

Words can run in the order of left to right or top to bottom.

When finished, the module automatically crops the grid into a crossword puzzle and automatically assigns a number to each word.

To see the clue for a word, the student clicks on the number in the crossword puzzle where the word begins.

Examples - Jcross

The modules

Jmatch

JMatch allows the teacher to create matching and sequencing exercises based on two columns of items.

JMatch allows for easy insertion of pictures, graphics, and images, so that the matching exercise could consist of pairing vocabulary words with the corresponding pictures.

Examples - Jmatch

The modules

Jmix

JMix is for the creation of exercises of scrambled sentences, paragraphs, or stories.

Students drag and drop the sentence fragments to put them in order, or they can click on the fragments sequentially to put the text together.

The teacher may add an unlimited amount of additional acceptable sentences, and can set up a warning to be shown if the alternate sentence put together by the student does not contain all of the words or punctuation of the original, preferred sentence.

Examples - Jmix

Examples - Jmix

The modules

The Masher

Hot Potatoes (Windows only) includes a program called the Masher.

The Masher is a tool for automatically compiling batches of Hot Potatoes exercises into units.

Imagine that you have five Hot Potatoes exercises that form a single unit of materials. You want to build HTML files from all the exercises, with the same colours and appearance settings; you also want to link the exercises together using the navigation buttons, and create an index file for the unit.

The Masher will do that for you.