http://www.agronomy.ucdavis.edu/EH/ENH6/quiz/

Hi,

I'm a graduate student in horticulture at the University of California at Davis and I've been working as a teaching assistant for an introductory class where students learn to recognize 150 common landscaping plants. To give students a way to practice their plant recognition (and spelling) I've set up a set of online quizzes and I'd love to get some feedback on how to make them more useful and user-friendly.

The Quizzes
There are three separate quizzes reviewing common names, scientific names, and plant families. Student choose the length and subject matter of the quiz, and they get a score at the end. All quizzes cover the same plants and use the same photos.

The Target Audience
Most of the people using the site are first- or second-year students with very little background in plant identification. All of them have their own computers, but some people are using dial-up connections, so the images have to be small.

The Intended Use
My goal is to make the quizzes fun, educational, and easy to use, so students will get into the habit of taking a quiz once or twice a day, after they check their e-mail. Spelling and capitalization count on the real exams, and this gives students a way to practice for that.

Where I Need Help
I'm interested in any feedback you can give me, but where I really need help is the fun part. How can I make this into more of a video game? What would motivate students to keep playing over and over?
I obviously need to add some sort of a scoreboard for them to watch as they go along, but what form should that take? Should I add a number, a meter, a tree growing out of the ground, or ... what? Maybe I should let the top scorers record their initials, the way they do on Pac-Man...

Anyway, thanks in advance for your feedback! And, if you take a practice test, I'd suggest using the Week 8 or Week 9 photos. My camera skills got better as the quarter went on.

URL

WOW I got them all right!

i seem to be able to cheat which always takes the edge off a test , when i click the "I give up. What is it?" button, I get a little js alert box with the answer, which is all well and good, but I can the n just close that down and put in the answer it's just given me and it says i got it right , perhaps, if when you hit the "I give up" button, it would go to an intermediate page with the answer and a continue button that would then take them to the next page.

I can also cheat by looking at the name of the image, and then matching that to the right entry in your js arrays, using a serverside language to store the information instead would solve this issue.

hmm... I did the 10 photo quiz, using weeks 8 and 9, and although i got 10 out of 10 by cheating *cough* it gives me a score of -53 and tells me to go study if this is an anti cheat measure it is confusing, and it wouldn't stop the second method.

no scoring system is going to work if it's so easy to cheat your way to 100%

atm, it's just a matter of memorising facts and names, which is always going to be dull, that maybe the limit of the module (i know i have some which are nothing more than that) but it might be necessary to expand the scope the tests so that they are a little more engaged.

I think the growing tree is a good idea for a scoring system, and that in itself would make things more fun.

some ideas:
- A time limit might get their pulses racing a little
- Gameboy style noises for different events (okay thats a silly one)

Hope that helps a little

Thanks Three!

One thing I'm hearing from you (and from the students) is that I need to make the scoring system more obvious. You thought you were getting away with something sneaky by hitting the "I give up" button, but it was actually taking ten points off your total each time. (That's why you ended up with a score of -53.)

So, without making the quiz page more cluttered, I need to make the rules a little more clear. I'm leaning more and more toward having a big "current score" box at the top of each page.

At this point, there's no reason for students to "cheat" on these quizzes. No names or scores are being recorded and students are only looking at the site to get ready for the REAL plant quizzes that are given in class each week. But I really do like the idea of adding a "high scores" page at the end where students can put in a name or nickname. I can see that being a big motivator for some of the guys, and they're the ones who seem to need motivation in this class.