If you edit an existing Challenge or click to add a new Challenge, you can now set some parameters for the activities within your Challenge.
("What's a Challenge?" you ask? -- see here.)
Autocheck
This affects the Tiles, Horizontal, Gap-fill text activities and the Shuffle match activity, and determines whether or not textivate checks answers as soon as tiles or gaps are dropped into place.
The default setting is "On".
(The default for existing challenges is "not specified".)
Split text by...
This affects the following text activities: Tiles, Horizontal, Multi-choice, Million.
Split by word count means that the words in the text are split into roughly evenly sized chunks.
Split by sentences / chunks means that, where possible, text chunks will be based on sentences and/or line breaks.
The default setting is "not specified".
(The default for existing challenges is "not specified".)
Show word list for gap-fill
This affects the 2 gap-fill activities: random and user-defined.
The default setting is "Yes" (i.e. word list is shown).
(The default for existing challenges is "not specified".)
Order of Match items
This affects the match activities: Multi-match, Jumble, and the Letters activities, and it determines whether or not the items are shown in random order or in their original order.
The default setting is "Random".
(The default for existing challenges is "not specified".)
Switch match order for Letter activities
This affects the match activities: Jumble, Letters, Hangman, Invaders, Snake and Maze.
Our recommendations are:
For match resources with items ordered L1>L2, set this to "No".
For match resources with items ordered L2>L1, set this to "Yes".
This prevents students scoring lots of points on these activities simply by typing in English (L1) words.
(There is also the option to set this to "Do not specify", but this is not recommended.)
The default setting is "No".
(The default for existing challenges is "No".)
Example?
Check out the Challenge on the link below, which is set up in the following way:
- Autocheck on: so all tile activities etc will check scores automatically.
- Split text by sentences / chunks: this is particularly useful for the resource included in this Challenge, which has been "chunked" as described in this blog post.
- Show word list for gap-fill = yes: so words can be dragged and dropped into position.
- Order of match items = random: so each match activity will run through the items in a different order.
- Switch match order for Letters etc = yes: this is because this resource has matching items listed as L2>L1. By choosing this option, we get the best of both worlds -- matching activities with a comprehension focus and writing activities with an output focus.
Hope you find this a useful addition to Challenges :0)