VISITview Quiz Creation Instructions

Introduction

This feature of VISITview allows the instructor to do real time testing or quizzing with a VISITview lesson. One quiz question can be created for each page in a lesson. It works as follows. When an instructor, connected to the VISITview server as a "master", clicks on the quiz button, the quiz (if one exists) for the current page is loaded. The student will see a popup window with a question, at least two choices, and a Submit button, similar to the following:

The instructor will also see a popup window, which gathers responses from the students and displays them, indicating incorrect responses with red text. This window will look similar to the following:

If no question exists for the current page, or there is a syntax error in the quiz file, the master will get a popup indicating this.

Instructions

1. Go to any previously created directory with lesson contents. If you have not created any lessons, you are ahead of yourself, and should not worry about making quiz questions until you have created a lesson. Delivered with the visitpack.zip compressed file, you will find an example quiz file, quiz_template.txt, which should look something like this:

   #
   # Sample Quiz File
   # June 1999
   # created by Tommy Jasmin, SSEC
   #
   # This file is assembled as follows.  For each page the instructor would
   # like to provide a quiz question, these four lines must be present:
   #
   #  1. page number or page label
   #  2. question
   #  3. choices
   #  4. answer
   #
   # The format of each line is: the above word or words, followed by a
   # colon, followed by the appropriate text for that line.  See the 
   # following examples below.  White space is optional, and choices must
   # be comma separated.
   #
   #
   # quiz info for lesson page 1
   #
   page number: 1
   question: What radar reflectivity color indicates a level-5 thunderstorm in the image shown?
   choices: blue,green,yellow,orange,red
   answer: orange
   #
   # quiz info for lesson page 2
   #
   page label: National IR/radar Composite
   question: There is a low pressure area centered near Indiana. (true or false)
   choices: true,false
   answer: true
   #
   # quiz info for lesson page 4
   #
   page number: 4
   question: Given the scenario, Lake Michigan will likely be completely clear by which image?
   choices: 191500,194500,201500,204500,211500
   answer: 194500
   #
   # quiz info for lesson page 8
   #
   page label: Goodland
   question: The storm system shown is moving at approximately what speed in MPH?
   choices: 20,40,60,80
   answer: 60
   #
   

2. Make a copy of the template, naming the new file quiz.txt. At present, this is exactly where the VISITview code will expect to find the questions, so you can't choose another name.

 
3. Edit the new file, providing for each question the following four fields in order:
   
   
   1. page label: (or page number:)
   2. question:
   3. choices:
   4. answer:
   
   Each field must start in column 1, and end with a colon. Choices must be comma separated. Blank space as desired for readability is optional. See the example above for actual use of these fields.

 
4. Delete the sample questions provided from the original template.

 
5. Place the new file in the directory that contains contents/files for the corresponding VISITview lesson it was designed for. Note: this file need only be physically present on the instructor's machine. You do not have to distribute it with your lesson file, if you don't want to. All questions and choices are sent as "commands" from the instructor's machine to the students', just like any other VISITview command.

Notes

At present, only one question is allowed per page. So, for a given lesson with N pages, there can be at most N questions. Once a question has been initiated for a given page, the quiz button is disabled until either another page is loaded, or until the current lesson is reloaded.

At present, only multiple choice and true/false questions are supported.

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