Hot Potatoes
– Quiz Builder
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Wintec
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The purpose of Hot
Potatoes
This is for creating a
quiz for students to
use online.
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Hot Potatoes access
• The software is available for download at
http://hotpot.uvic.ca/
• Hot Potatoes is not freeware, but it is free of charge
for publicly funded, non-profit, educational users
who make their pages available on the web. Other
users must pay for a licence.
• Hot Potatoes is free for school use.
• Hot Potatoes must be installed on the computer
before use.
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What is Hot Potatoes?
• This quiz authoring software is downloaded then
installed on your computer. A simple interface is
used to devise a series of questions and to prescribe
the answers, with feedback if required.
• The questions are then assembled into a test and
can be made available to students on your Moodle
website.
• Students receive immediate feedback as they work
on the quiz, though student test results are not
recorded for person who created the quiz.
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Quiz types
• interactive multiple-choice
• short-answer
• jumbled-sentence
• crossword
• matching/ordering
• gap-fill exercises
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Hot Potatoes
• Text and graphics may be included in the questions
as well as links to external files or websites.
• You can devise a range of feedback comments for
your students to receive depending on their
answers to your questions.
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Hot Potatoes
• Text and graphics may be included in the questions
as well as links to external files or websites.
• You can devise a range of feedback comments for
your students to receive depending on their
answers to your questions.
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Hot Potatoes
• The Hot Potatoes software is easy to use and
intuitive and you do not need to know how to
design or create web pages in order to use it.
• Many people use the standard “look and feel” for
their questions but you can customise the colour
scheme, formatting,control buttons and so on.
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Hot Potatoes
• The finished quiz has a simple interface which
students can usually use without any special
instruction.
• Hot Potatoes is very user friendly and inserts easily
into a Moodle site.
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Creating Quizes with Hot
Potatoes
• Download the software from the Hot potatoes
website.
http://hotpot.uvic.ca/index.php#downloads
• Install the software onto your computer by clicking
on the file that you downloaded.
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Using Hot Potatoes
•
•
•
•
Click on Start
All programmes
Select Hot Potatoes
Click Hot Potatoes 6
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Tutorials for Hot Potatoes
• http://hotpot.uvic.ca/tutorials6.php
• Google Hot Potatoes for extra tutorials, resources for
Hot Potatoes
• Watch tutorials on YouTube.
• Watch the tutorial within Hot Potatoes
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From this initial screen you can click on the different quiz authoring tools
available:
JCloze : gap filling exercises
JQuiz : interactive multiple choice
JCross : crossword
JMatch: matching/ordering
JMix: jumbled sentence
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To select click on the hot potato you wish to use 
Jquiz : Multiple Choice or
short answer
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First: Type in the quiz title
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Next type in your
multichoice question.
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Type in the multi-choice answers and click
correct to the answer.
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Place appropriate
feedback for each answer.
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Click the up arrow to
move to the next question.
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Continue adding questions to your
quiz in the same way.
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Don’t forget to save your quiz often. You can save
the quiz and edit at a later date.
Note this is not publishing the quiz for inserting into Moodle. You are just
saving the quiz as a hot potato file.
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Publishing your quiz as a web page
ready to insert into Moodle
Click on the icon export quiz as a hot potatoes web
page
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Select a location to save your
quiz webpage and click Save.
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Click on View the exercies in my
browser to check out the quiz.
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Test your quiz before uploading
to Moodle to check for mistakes.
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Doing ok so far.......
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Question 2 is more
difficult.....
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When completed you get
a score.
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Uploading your Hot
Potato quiz to Moodle.
• First your quiz web page created by Hot Potatoes
must be saved to a folder on your computer or
computer network drive.
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Next login to your moodle site and
navigate to your moodle course.
Go to the Administration block and click Files.
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Click on Make a Folder
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Add title to folder and
click Create
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Click on the Hot Potatoes
folder
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Now click upload a file
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Click Browse to locate your hot
potatoes quiz file(webpage)
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Click on the html file (webpage) you have saved.
Then click Open.
Donot try to upload your saved Hot Potatoes quiz files that you might also have
saved in this folder...They will not work in Moodle!
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Click Upload this file
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The htm (webpage) has now been
uploaded to your Moodle files.
We can now link to this in Moodle.
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Click the home page
breadcrumb link to the
Moodle home page.
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Click on Add an Activity:
then choose Hot Potatoes
Quiz
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Click on Choose or
upload a file
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Double click on Hot Potatoes
Quizes to find your saved
quiz
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Click on Choose
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File is now inserted into the
Moodle Hot Potatoes link
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Scroll to the bottom and click
on Save and return to course.
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Click on the link to your
Hot Potatoes Quiz to test.
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Quiz now inserted into the Moodle
block ready for students.
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Inserting images to a
multi-choice quiz
• First: locate your images and load into a folder on
your computer clearly labelled.
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Clearly label your images
and save on computer.
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Click on Insert/picture and
then Picture from Local File
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Select image in folder and then
click open. (only gif, jpeg or png)
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Click OK
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Code for image is now
inserted in answers.
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Now type in feedback.
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and feedback and tick
correct answer.
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Click export to create a
Hot potatoes webpage.
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View the hot potatoes quiz in your
web browser: you will need to
enable active X controls.
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The pictures in this type of
quiz will only display if used
from the local computer.
• For the images to display in Moodle you need to
source the images directly from the internet.
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Select Insert/Picture/Picture
from Web URL
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Go to the webpage with the image
you wish to display in quiz.Copy
the webpage URL (control V)
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Paste the Link URL and
then click OK
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Click Export quiz as a webpage.
Upload to Moodle and link.
Test Hot Potatoes quiz.
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