My problem:
There is a particular quiz I am working on which involves a scenario and using some pretty basic mathematics to answer various questions about this scenario. The way I would like to have this set out is a description of the scenario, giving all the relevant variables, followed by the questions. Now comes the interesting bit - I want to have different variables each time a person attempts the quiz and I want these variables to be the same for all of the questions. This means that "travelled 100m in 36s" in the description is related to the answer of "10kmph" in question 3, with random variations instead of the values I have given.
My crude attempt at solving this problem:
I set up my questions as calculated questions, putting the scenario description in the first question so it could make use of the wildcards. For each question I checked 'use shared dataset' and synchronised the shared datasets from the first question (containing the description and thus also all of the variables). I thought this would do the trick but it would seem that, although each question uses the same pool of datasets, they each randomly select a different dataset from said pool.
Questions:
Probably most importantly - is this even possible? It seems that I (at first) grossly misunderstood how wildcards in calculated questions actually work and what terms like 'shared dataset' mean. This took me a long time to figure out (if I have done such a thing at all). Unless I'm missing something it looks like calculated questions in their current form won't help me.
What about Cloze questions? I don't really understand these very well at the moment, but they seem to be very versitile, including the important feature of being able to have multiple questions in the same question. However from what I've seen I can't have any randomness and I can't base one part of a question upon another.
Bonus round:
How about questions based upon previous answers? For example:
Description:
A ball is dropped with zero velocity and falls for 2 seconds before hitting the ground.
Assume that the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8m/s/s and that air resistance is negligible.
Question 1:
What is the ball's speed after 1 second?
[ 9.8*1 = 9.8 m/s ]
Question 2:
How far has the ball travelled after 1 second?
[ 1*(9.8+0)/2 = 4.9 m ]
But what if the student had answered question 1 wrongly? Perhaps she answered "3 m/s". Then, even if she did everything in question 2 correctly, she would get an answer of "1.5 m" and get no credit for her work. To be fair, the answer of Question 2 should really be specified by [ 1*( [Answer to Question 1] +0)/2 ] .
At the moment it seems that the best way to deal with this is to mark each answer as the student progresses, so that mistakes are caught early before they propogate through the rest of the questions. This is good but definitely not ideal.
Well that's my essay over. If you've gotten this far I thank you for sticking through with it. I would really appreciate any help you can offer with these problems - particular the first problem as this is really holding me back at the moment. I would also like to know if other Moodlers are having the same problem. I imagine it would be a major source of frustration in the sciences.
Thanks,
Robin Georg