Hi
I am trying to create a science quiz, but I am unable to correctly format multichoice answers... so for example H20 appears as H2O. It's easy in the question text, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do it in the answer windows.
Many thanks
J
Here are two ways I know which work:
1: Enter the raw HTML code in the text box for the answer: H<sub>2</sub>O
2: Turn on the LaTeX filter and use LaTeX in the answer box: "$$$H_2O$$$" which renders as $$H_2O$$.
1: Enter the raw HTML code in the text box for the answer: H<sub>2</sub>O
2: Turn on the LaTeX filter and use LaTeX in the answer box: "$$$H_2O$$$" which renders as $$H_2O$$.
Thanks for the helpful replies....so simple when you know how! I didn't know that I could enter html without using the html toggle, which of course doesn't appear in the answer box. Many thanks.
If you use MathType Editor you can write your codes and copy->paste to editor.
I can write you how can you do that but i don't know do you want it.
Thanks. It really helped..Same as <sub></sub, I tried <sup></sup> for super script and it works like a charm..Great !! thanks
Let me elaborate a little on Roger's answers. From your question, I gather that you find it easier to create the questions using the built-in HTML editor in the question text. If creating raw HTML is a challenge for you, you could use the question window to compose your formatted text. Then click on the <> button in the toolbar to toggle to HTML mode, cut the text from there, and paste it into the answer box.
Also, I have a suggestion if you decide to use the LaTeX solution. You might prefer to have the symbols for the elements appear in normal text rather than italics. It's a bit more typing, but $$\textrm{H}_2\textrm{O}$$ which appears as $$\textrm{H}_2\textrm{O}$$ might give you more what you want./font>
In reply to Jean Jacoby
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Your solution works fine when providing a formatted question to a student. But not for quiz answers that the student need to provide. A simplified example is:
"What is the formula of methane?"
Incorrect answer is CH4
correct answer is CH4
How can a student input this into a shortanswer box (in Cloze)?
I would expect a student to learn and input chemical coding as part of the overall learning.
I have a similar difficulty in finding a way for students to enter structural formulae into answers, e.g.
H
¦
H-C-H
¦
H
[When originally typed and submitted, the ¦¦ lined up vertically with the C. But the space padding is compressed on viewing.]
One can of course use multi-choice question options in their various flavours, but I should prefer the student to learn by doing as well as by choosing.
Velson Horie
"What is the formula of methane?"
Incorrect answer is CH4
correct answer is CH4
How can a student input this into a shortanswer box (in Cloze)?
I would expect a student to learn and input chemical coding as part of the overall learning.
I have a similar difficulty in finding a way for students to enter structural formulae into answers, e.g.
H
¦
H-C-H
¦
H
[When originally typed and submitted, the ¦¦ lined up vertically with the C. But the space padding is compressed on viewing.]
One can of course use multi-choice question options in their various flavours, but I should prefer the student to learn by doing as well as by choosing.
Velson Horie
It's a bit of a juggling act but you can do some fancy layout with Cloze and HTML tables. See http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=138247#p603331
You might be able to do something like:
You might be able to do something like:
| H |
||||
| | |
||||
| H |
- |
C |
- |
H |
| | |
||||
| H |
Take a look at jme http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=296&filter=1
Morten
Thank you for this link.
I am still looking for a way for a student to create a methane molecule, hopefully showing all 5 atoms linked by bonds. The next question is to ask the student to draw ethene and ethane molecules, demonstrating knowledge of the differences.
The student should learn and be able to reproduce those without a prompt, but
JME automatically works out the valencies. Also, I have not found a way to show C atoms.
Can one switch off the JME chemical "intelligence"?
Velson Horie
I am still looking for a way for a student to create a methane molecule, hopefully showing all 5 atoms linked by bonds. The next question is to ask the student to draw ethene and ethane molecules, demonstrating knowledge of the differences.
The student should learn and be able to reproduce those without a prompt, but
JME automatically works out the valencies. Also, I have not found a way to show C atoms.
Can one switch off the JME chemical "intelligence"?
Velson Horie
In reply to Velson Horie
Ang: Re: Ang: Re: Scientific notation in quiz answers
by Morten Brydensholt -
Hi Velson
I don't think that's possible at the moment.
Neither to switch of 'intelligence' from jme, nor to input normal or lowered numbers into chemical formulas using Moodles cloze quiz engine.
Best regards
Morten
Morten
Thank you for the confirmation of what I feared.
I am trying to convert an international paper based distance learning course to web based.
The alternative seems to be for the students to write the answers on paper, scan them in, upload the images to Moodle, then include the images in an essay answer. It might be easier to stick to paper with the 2-3 week turnaround!
VLE has considerable improvements to make if it is to replace paper and post.
Velson Horie
Thank you for the confirmation of what I feared.
I am trying to convert an international paper based distance learning course to web based.
The alternative seems to be for the students to write the answers on paper, scan them in, upload the images to Moodle, then include the images in an essay answer. It might be easier to stick to paper with the 2-3 week turnaround!
VLE has considerable improvements to make if it is to replace paper and post.
Velson Horie
Hi Velson,
I can understand your disappointment, but this is probably a case of setting your level of expectations too high. At the moment a VLE is no more able to evaluate the correctness of the formula of a methane molecule than it can evaluate an essay, a dissertation or a painting.
If, however, you follow the advice given in this thread, you can have the students "construct" their answer using the Maths, etc. tools available, post the result as an image within an essay (or attached to it), or as an assignment, which the teacher can then mark, same as they would mark an essay or any other kind of student answer that cannot be automatically evaluated by the quiz engine itself.
I hope that helps and will make you re-consider resorting to "paper and post" as the only solution to your problem.
Joseph
Thank you.
Within Moodle, it is not yet possible for a student to enter CH4 into a shortanswer. Neither is it possible at all for a student to construct a structural diagram of methane (JME does not allow a drawing from scratch). One can of course provide multi-choice questions already populated with super/subscripts, but that is spoon feeding and we need to get students working how the real world works.
Automatic marking of these inputs in Moodle may be developed later, but it should be possible now for CH<sub>4</sub> to be recognised as correct and CH4 as incorrect.
For now, I shall take your advice and use the essay window to enable students to enter maths type formulae.
However, I cannot find any tool to enable students to draw a structural diagram, then paste/copy it into the essay window. It would add another extra load for the student to download and understand yet another computer (graphical) programme in order to draw these diagrams.
Velson
Within Moodle, it is not yet possible for a student to enter CH4 into a shortanswer. Neither is it possible at all for a student to construct a structural diagram of methane (JME does not allow a drawing from scratch). One can of course provide multi-choice questions already populated with super/subscripts, but that is spoon feeding and we need to get students working how the real world works.
Automatic marking of these inputs in Moodle may be developed later, but it should be possible now for CH<sub>4</sub> to be recognised as correct and CH4 as incorrect.
For now, I shall take your advice and use the essay window to enable students to enter maths type formulae.
However, I cannot find any tool to enable students to draw a structural diagram, then paste/copy it into the essay window. It would add another extra load for the student to download and understand yet another computer (graphical) programme in order to draw these diagrams.
Velson
In reply to Jean Jacoby
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Thank you, but d=93522 allows the teacher to prepare a question choice with subscripts.
It does not allow a student to input an answer with subscripts then have it marked either automatically or manually.
There is a difficulty with Moodle terminology, which causes muddle. Moodle defines a question choice prepared by the teacher as an "answer". But it isn't. It's a question. The answer is something prepared (or chosen) by the student.
The student needs to be given comparable resources to the teacher. Otherwise the student will never be able to aspire to the standards a teacher thinks as normal.
Velson
It does not allow a student to input an answer with subscripts then have it marked either automatically or manually.
There is a difficulty with Moodle terminology, which causes muddle. Moodle defines a question choice prepared by the teacher as an "answer". But it isn't. It's a question. The answer is something prepared (or chosen) by the student.
The student needs to be given comparable resources to the teacher. Otherwise the student will never be able to aspire to the standards a teacher thinks as normal.
Velson
Hi Velson,
I'm afraid you are getting things mixed up between the different question types that exist (in VLE's in general and specific to Moodle).
Multliple Choice Question type (MCQ)
The teacher can include almost anything in each of the choices. The student can only select one (or more, in the case of MCQ, Multiple Answers) of the possible choices or "answers" on offer.
The terminology for MCQ questions "answers" is not specific to Moodle.
In the Wikipedia article about MCQ, they say "respondents are asked to select the best possible answer (or answers) out of the choices from a list."
"Multiple choice items consist of a stem and a set of options."
"The options are the possible answers that the examinee can choose from, with the correct answer called the key and the incorrect answers called distractors."
For more info about the current Moodle terminology about question / answer / response / feedback, etc. see this discussion.
Short Answer question type (SA)
This is the type of question where you would like the student to be able to type a chemical formula. If you tell your students how to type the unicode superscript and subscript characters, then there is no problem for them to enter their answer as expected. You could even provide the needed characters in the text of your question for them to copy-paste (see attached example).
However, in the case of a far more complex formula such as
H
¦
H-C-H
¦
H
it is obviously quite impossible for the student to enter that into a SA answer box and even more impossible for the moodle quiz question engine to analyse that kind of answer.
"The student needs to be given comparable resources to the teacher. Otherwise the student will never be able to aspire to the standards a teacher thinks as normal."
In the light of my explanations above, I'm afraid I do not understand what you mean by that. The current impossibility for the student to enter complicated formula into a SA answer box is due the the inherent limitations of today's programing resources. This may change in the future, but it has nothing to do with "not providing comparable resources to teacher and student".
Joseph
Thank you - I had not realised the unicode option. I am still learning - all too slowly
However, it does not necessarily give the right answer, see below.
One resource available to teachers when preparing questions and not available to students for answers is the html editing panel. This makes it difficult to enter these formulae, especially when people are using different browsers.
Moodle is still a very text based interface. For working with chemistry and objects (my field), much of the communication is diagram and image based.
Velson Horie
However, it does not necessarily give the right answer, see below.
One resource available to teachers when preparing questions and not available to students for answers is the html editing panel. This makes it difficult to enter these formulae, especially when people are using different browsers.
Moodle is still a very text based interface. For working with chemistry and objects (my field), much of the communication is diagram and image based.
Velson Horie
I don't see the problem. If what you want is a molecular formula, here it is: Fe₃O₅
If you want the students to be able to type such formulae into answer boxes themselves (rather than providing them as choices in an MCQ or Cloze), one way is to direct them to a character picker such as this one and ask them to copy/paste the output into Moodle. Better yet, since superscripts and subscripts are likely all they'll need, just give those in the question text, so they can copy/paste without having to go back and forth between webpages.
For what it's worth, it's not clear to me that requiring students to struggle with a character picker contributes to their learning of the material... in other words, typing Fe₃O₅ vs Fe3O5 doesn't demonstrate anything about their knowledge of chemistry. (In my department (linguistics) this issue is not so easily resolved, so we do have students use character pickers like these for typing transcriptions using the International Phonetic Alphabet.)
Perhaps you're talking about capitalization? There would be an important difference between CO₂ and Co₂ but it's easy enough to specify "match case" with short answer questions. So what exactly is the issue? I realize that what I've said doesn't address the problem of structural formulae and isomers, but other posts in this thread have offered reasonable solutions for that already. Is there some other problem that I'm just not seeing?
If you want the students to be able to type such formulae into answer boxes themselves (rather than providing them as choices in an MCQ or Cloze), one way is to direct them to a character picker such as this one and ask them to copy/paste the output into Moodle. Better yet, since superscripts and subscripts are likely all they'll need, just give those in the question text, so they can copy/paste without having to go back and forth between webpages.
For what it's worth, it's not clear to me that requiring students to struggle with a character picker contributes to their learning of the material... in other words, typing Fe₃O₅ vs Fe3O5 doesn't demonstrate anything about their knowledge of chemistry. (In my department (linguistics) this issue is not so easily resolved, so we do have students use character pickers like these for typing transcriptions using the International Phonetic Alphabet.)
Perhaps you're talking about capitalization? There would be an important difference between CO₂ and Co₂ but it's easy enough to specify "match case" with short answer questions. So what exactly is the issue? I realize that what I've said doesn't address the problem of structural formulae and isomers, but other posts in this thread have offered reasonable solutions for that already. Is there some other problem that I'm just not seeing?
In any subject area, there are conventions about what is right and what is not right.
Fe₃Oâ (as copied from the email) is not right, Fe3O5- is correct. So we need to encourage students to recognise, learn and reproduce the correct form in any work. In linguistics, "its" and "it's" sound the same but have different meanings.
None of the unicode or drop down boxes seem to have subscript n etc (I have just found the ² ³ on another unicode page, e.g. Fe3+). So it is not possible using this method to type
-(CH2 - CH2)n -
(as the students would be expected to do - what is the formula of polyethene?) - or have I missed another unicode page with this character?
I have used the html buttons in the Moodle edit box to prepare this formula, which I cannot find a way to do using unicode. Currently, students can write these perfectly well with pen and paper and are marked down if they do not use subscripts etc correctly. If this course work is to be translated from paper to screen, a simple method to input the correct response is needed. It would be useful if the student editing interface for input across a course, e.g. shortanswers and essays etc, was the same.
Copying a character from a pick list can work in part, though it is a bit clunky. Is it possible to have the pick list in a side panel always available in a quiz (or all) so that it becomes a standard resource for the student? This would save having to include the pick list in every question.
Velson Horie
Velson Horie
If the formula is coming through in your email as "Fe₃Oâ" then there is probably an encoding issue with your email client or your browser (i.e., it is interpreting UTF-8 codepoints using some other encoding scheme). If unicode points are being interpreted as UTF-8, then the following two lines should read the same (with slight differences in rendering size of the subscript glyphs):
HTML: Fe3O5-
Unicode: Fe₃O₅⁻
But regardless of that problem, you have now hit on a genuine shortcoming with a Unicode-based solution: unfortunately there is no codepoint defined for a subscript n.
Your comment about "its" vs "it's" has little to do with linguistics (rather it's a spelling convention; phonetically these two words would be transcribed identically). But I agree that it is important for students to recognize and produce the correct form (which is why we have our students use unicode character pickers instead of some other approach that only approximates the standard). Unfortunately it seems such an approach won't work for chemistry (at least not for formulae that require a subscript n). But if you can live without the n's, this is a good reference page for which super- and subscript glyphs are covered by Unicode, and shows the difference in rendering between a Unicode character and an equivalent HTML markup approach. Also invaluable when dealing with Unicode is this site.
HTML: Fe3O5-
Unicode: Fe₃O₅⁻
But regardless of that problem, you have now hit on a genuine shortcoming with a Unicode-based solution: unfortunately there is no codepoint defined for a subscript n.
Your comment about "its" vs "it's" has little to do with linguistics (rather it's a spelling convention; phonetically these two words would be transcribed identically). But I agree that it is important for students to recognize and produce the correct form (which is why we have our students use unicode character pickers instead of some other approach that only approximates the standard). Unfortunately it seems such an approach won't work for chemistry (at least not for formulae that require a subscript n). But if you can live without the n's, this is a good reference page for which super- and subscript glyphs are covered by Unicode, and shows the difference in rendering between a Unicode character and an equivalent HTML markup approach. Also invaluable when dealing with Unicode is this site.
Daniel "Your comment about "its" vs "it's" has little to do with linguistics (rather it's a spelling convention...)".
As a teacher of English of 44 years (soon to retire 
) I beg to disagree. The difference between "its" and "it's" is not a spelling convention (unless of course you regard anything written in any language as a spelling convention). Those two homophones are two completely different linguistic entities, and I'm always amazed that native speakers should confuse them.
Regarding the lack of a unicode entity for Latin subscript "n", I've found out that there are plans to make it available.
ATB
Joseph
I agree that they have different meanings (and thus are distinct morphemes), but with respect to the issues under discussion on this thread (namely using unicode to represent a transcriptional convention) the difference in spelling (and in meaning) is irrelevant. Both are properly transcribed as [ɪts].
Leaving aside the discussion of the role of " ' " in understanding and teaching English, I am grateful for the help and work arounds you have given me. Unfortunately chemistry, and other sciences, are littered with subscripts, diagrams etc.
A few examples that I use in my course are
Tg glass transition temperature
Mw weight average molecular weight
DPv viscosity average degree of polymerisation
-(CH2)x- a methylene chain of unspecified length
These were really easy to input using the Moodle editing tool, for me and presumably the students when they get used to it. My request is to make this tool available for all occasions when a student needs to input a textual response. Apart from re-writing large bits of the question coding, are there any difficulties with that solution? For backward compatibility, one would have to create a new shortanswer-html question type.
My next request would be to be able paste images into essay answers, so that chemical diagrams etc could be part of the normal response mode for the student, as they are in routine chemical discussions. (Wonderful things blackboards) The natural way to achieve this (analogous to the class room situation) would to be able to draw straight into the essay answer, but that may be a technology too far at the moment.
Velson Horie
A few examples that I use in my course are
Tg glass transition temperature
Mw weight average molecular weight
DPv viscosity average degree of polymerisation
-(CH2)x- a methylene chain of unspecified length
These were really easy to input using the Moodle editing tool, for me and presumably the students when they get used to it. My request is to make this tool available for all occasions when a student needs to input a textual response. Apart from re-writing large bits of the question coding, are there any difficulties with that solution? For backward compatibility, one would have to create a new shortanswer-html question type.
My next request would be to be able paste images into essay answers, so that chemical diagrams etc could be part of the normal response mode for the student, as they are in routine chemical discussions. (Wonderful things blackboards) The natural way to achieve this (analogous to the class room situation) would to be able to draw straight into the essay answer, but that may be a technology too far at the moment.
Velson Horie