Hot Potatoes

Hot Potatoes(Available on Windows and OSX HERE) is a piece of software for creating a number of different types of quizzes. The types on offer range from crosswords to fill-in-the-blank questions and general quizzes. It gives options for multiple choice answers and hints, with slots to add additional info on questions.

It's quite a well thought out bit of software and makes making quizzes and crosswords very easy. It also allows you to export the finished product as an html file, so you can open it anywhere... in theory.

Here is where Hot Potatoes starts to fall short: it's made in Java. Anyone who's spent longer than 10 minutes on a computer will know how much of a pain the existence of Java is. A friend of mine who studied computer engineering once cracked a joke about how "the computers in this film are so unrealistic; he's been using it for over 30 seconds and it hasn't asked him to update his Java software". This gripe with Java was punctuated during the lesson where I was introduced to it, where the entire class got caught in the deadlock of "you must update Java" Vs "You don't have the user permissions to update Java". This problem is exacerbated by the fact that browsers such as Chrome and Firefox are dropping support for Java (and lets not mention tablets).

There are alternatives to Hot Potatoes available, such as LearnClick and QuizPress, and these have various pros and cons when compared to Hot Potatoes in regards to price, usability and functionality.

But lets assume that we get Hot Potatoes working just fine and we have no issues with Java, how useful is it in the delivery of a Music Technology course?

I feel the answer to this question lies in how useful a quiz of these types might be to the field. I certainly wouldn't feel like asking students to complete a crossword was appropriate to ask of undergraduate students, and neither would I feel comfortable in asking them to perform another similar type of quiz. Thinking back to my days as an undergraduate I think I would have been quite insulted if my lecturer had asked me to open a browser and try and complete a quiz (unless of course it was the Philips Golden Ear Challenge).

Perhaps I am looking at it wrong. I understand that quizzes such as these can be useful in assessing whether students have retained the information you have given them, I just fail to see a way of applying it within Music Technology that would not be better served by another assessment method.

There was, during my class, the suggestion that quizzes could be useful in assessing the level of students when they begin a course/module and get an overall idea of their knowledge base. This is a fair comment, although personal experience tells me that having a class discussion where everybody talks about their background and we, as a group, go through some topics that students may or may not have knowledge on tends to serve the purpose in a better way. the discussion adds a bonding element to the group as they get to know each other and the students also get to learn snippets of information from the discussions. The method of using quizzes would (i feel) be a far more individual task and wouldn't have the added bonding-bonus that the discussion provides. This is something I feel is very important for Music Technology students as, in this university at least, there are a lot of group and class based projects.

Quizzes do have a place within Music Technology, such as with the Golden Ear Challenge, with AB-tests, and with surveys for research papers, but all of these are serviced in a far superior way by other software.

So, to conclude, Hot Potatoes does what it does, but if thats what you need to then there is better and more up-to-date software available. I also cannot think of a way in which using quizzes would be the most appropriate assessment method at an undergraduate level.