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Downloadable Freeware JavaScript Quiz Generators Reviewed
This page offers my personal reviews of downloadable freeware for creating interactive JavaScript quizzes. If you already know what these kind of things do, read on. If you're a bit unsure, you might like to take a look at my page "Creating Interactive...". It provides a comprehensive introduction for EFL/ESL teachers wanting to start producing interactive activity webpages for their students.
I'm an EFL teacher, so I've only reviewed software that can be applied to teaching the English language. Maths quizzes are not covered, for example. I have personally downloaded and roadtested all the software on a machine running Windows 98. I am therefore unable to personally guarantee compatability with other versions of Windows (XP, for example). I also cannot comment on the quality of Macintosh versions where these are available.
The download time is the time it took me to download the file(s) on a dial-up connection using a 56k modem. The rating is a general evaluation that includes anything that I consider relevant: download time, quality of help files, ease of use, features, bugginess etc. The maximum rating is five stars.
Name: Hot Potatoes
Developer: Half-Baked Software
Version Downloaded and Tested: 5.2
Platforms: Win: 95/98/ME/NT4/2000/XP, Mac: PowerMac/G3/G4 OS 8+
Date Downloaded and Tested: September 2001
Downloaded from: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/hotpot/
File Type: Zipped (Win), Stufflt (Mac)
Size: 5250kb
Download Time: About one hour
Hotpot, as it's affectionately known, is the world's most popular JavaScript quiz generator for EFL. Created by two guys, one a former EFL teacher, at the University of Victoria in Canada, it's a suite of applications designed specifically for EFL teaching. Each application allows you to create a different kind of activity. As well as multiple-choice and true or false quizzes, you can also produce gap-fill, matching, ordering, crossword and jumbled-sentence activities.
The software is distributed on a semi-commercial basis. If you want to use it for commercial purposes, you have to pay a small licence fee. However, if you're just an individual teacher using it to post quizzes on the web to help your students improve their English, it's totally free. You do have to register it though, in order to get the key (password) that you need to install it.
The semi-commerciality (is that a word?) of the suite explains it's outstanding quality. Free of major bugs and remarkably straightforward to use, each quiz created with it can be saved to disk in a file format that allows it to be reedited later or exported to create a single HTML file that is ready for instant upload. This means that it can be used by people with no HTML knowledge whatsoever. It also allows the creator complete control over the look of the page in terms of fonts and colours.
Negative points are hard to find. The fact that the jumbled sentences each have to be saved as separate HTML files sticks out, as does the students' interface for navigating the activities. It's made up of buttons with symbols, without text, which means it can take a while for the student to figure out exactly what to do. Another problem is that you can't rely on the browser's back button to take you back to the page you linked from when you're doing a quiz, though you can set embedded links when you create the quiz to provide an alternative. These are all very minor gripes, of course, and any teacher looking for a quick and easy way to make interactive webpages for their students should download it straight away. It takes a while, Flash it ain't, but this is simple and clean JavaScripting at it's very best.
Name: Java Squizzard
Developer: Gregory Fox
Version Downloaded and Tested: 1.2
Platforms: Windows 95/98/NT4
Date Downloaded and Tested: 1 March 2002
Downloaded from: http://www.delphi32.com/vcl/3935/
File Type: Zipped
Size: 268kb
Download Time: 5 minutes 34 seconds
There isn't really any nice way to say it, and believe me, I want to say it nicely because I know as well as anyone what a thankless task computer programming is, especially when the end product is freeware that you decide to give away to all and sundry for zilch. The problem with this little app is simple: it doesn't work. There, said it.
Seriously, this thing has more bugs than the Amazon rainforest, and not just minor ones either. After a trouble free download and extraction, I took a look at the help files to get a better idea of what the program could do. It looked unremarkable, but simple and straightforward. The program could create multiple-choice or true/false quizzes and turn them into HTML format ready for upload. That was it. No feedback, just a running percentage score. It did allow you to set the number of points awarded for each question, though - an interesting idea that could be used to allow students to score extra points for tricky questions.
Moderately excited, I ran the program. I was asked to choose a name for the quiz and save it to a folder. Strange I thought. Why am I saving the thing before I've even created it? It turned out that the program works by setting up a frameset document containing a main frame, a frame for the score, a frame for the restart button, a frame for the gif images it uses etc. The welcome page, end page, and pages for each question are all separate HTML files that are saved as you write them. What I was doing was specifying a folder to hold all these separate files along with the default gifs and a css file. Hmm, this is going to mean some serious uploading and file managing, I thought.
After saving a welcome message and an ending message as individual HTML files, I wrote and saved a three question multiple-choice quiz with no problems and opened it in IE. It worked fine except that the last question wouldn't appear for some reason. OK, it's buggy, I thought. Try again. The second time it worked fine so I set about uploading it to Tripod. After uploading all the files from the quiz folder I had created (14 in all, totalling over 100kb!) I loaded the index page but unfortunately all the frames were showing a 404 (File not Found). After viewing source, I traced the problem. The links to the files had been rendered with spaces instead of underscores between the words, for example, "Squiggles Quiz Demoindex.html". This was no problem on my computer as Windows can support file names with spaces. Unfortunately, Tripod (maybe some webservers can) cannot. The file names had automatically had their spaces replaced with underscores, "Squiggles_Quiz_Demoindex.html", for example. Obviously this meant that all the complex links between the HTML files were leading nowhere. I couldn't believe the program had actually been set up like that - everyone knows that you can't use spaces in URLs. After opening all the source files, finding the links and correcting them, I thought we were back in business. However, another problem surfaced. The browser was rendering code where the score frame should have been. I opened the score file and deleted a document.write command that was causing the problem. At this point I decided enough was enough. I was never going to use this program and I wasn't going to be able to recommend it to anyone, so what was the point in troubleshooting it further. The result is that you can't see the score in the example I've linked to. There's just an empty white space there.
Even if it worked properly, this software has little to recommend it. The interface is abysmal and requires unnecessary background images and gifs, and the fact that it creates separate HTML files for every question is extremely inconvenient. The software allows you to create a quiz with up to 120 questions, but who wants to upload 120+ files to their server?
Name: QuizPlease
Developer: MoneyTree Software Company
Version Downloaded and Tested: 97.2
Platforms: Windows 95
Date Downloaded and Tested: 5 March 2002
Downloaded from: http://www.quizplease.com/
File Type: Setup.exe
Size: 4520kb
Download Time: 49 minutes 40 seconds
First, I want to make it clear that QuizPlease only gets two stars for one simple reason: the freeware version only allows you to make a quiz with three questions. If you want to make a longer quiz, you'll have to hand over some cash. On this page I'm only reviewing stuff that is totally free, so my rating only applies to the unregistered version. If you could make longer quizzes, it'd get three, or even four stars.
The program is pretty old, nearly five years, and doesn't look like it's ever going to be developed further. Nevertheless, despite it's age it's a extremely high quality application with a really easy-to-use interface that you can figure it out without resorting to the help file. It allows you to create multiple-choice quizzes with instant feedback or self-marking at the end (my example), as well as self-marking fill-in-the-blank quizzes. It also allows you to create emailable forms for surveys and assignments, though I didn't test those as they fall outside the scope of this review page. For the multiple-choice quizzes, you can provide a hint for each question, and both quiz formats allow images to be used with the questions. This would be very useful for making a vocabulary quiz on fruits, clothes etc. Once you've created your quiz, you can automatically export it to a single HTML file ready for upload. The file doesn't use frames either, which is a boon for teachers whose sites have embedded ads in every HTML document like me. You can also create a separate answer key file at the same time. Click here. If you're not happy with your quiz, all you have to do is restart QuizPlease, select your quiz from the menu, change it, and then click the button to export it again. It will automatically write over the old file. This is fantastic, and makes the saving under different file types with HotPot seem a real chore in comparison.
Aside from the three questions only restriction (you can of course make as many of these as you like), the only drawback is a somewhat cluttered student interface (the finished quiz page). On the page you get a list of such things as the quiz name, quiz number, author, author's email, author's URL etc which I for one could do without. The more wired user can, of course, edit the source to remove this chaff. You could also edit the source to change the colours and fonts, which are very 1997 and cannot be changed using the software itself.
If you've already got HotPot, this one's probably not worth the download due to the three questions restriction. If you want to give your students a fresh format to work with, however, it's worth a look.
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Last Edited: 7 March 2002
© 2002 Matt Stanton
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