Sketches within long answers

Sketches within long answers

by Brian Mulligan -
Number of replies: 14

Has anyone considered the possibility of being able to insert small sketches into long answers in quizzes?  We need to examine Engineering students at a distance where there is quite a need for them to make sketches during exams.  This could also be used to allow them to insert mathematical formulae and calculations.  If there was a feature within the long answers that allowed them to insert a sketch, it might allow us to move away from pen and paper bases examinations.  Does anyone know of other testing products that might include this?

Happy New Year.

Brian

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In reply to Brian Mulligan

Re: Sketches within long answers

by Scott Black -

Brian's problem and his suggested solution are related to a similar issue we face in testing. When we deliver accounting-related quizzes we need a tool that will provide a table that participants can interact with. At present, we can only present "dead" tables in a quiz. What we need are "live" tables with some cells populated by us, and the rest populated by the participants.

Scott Black

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Re: Sketches within long answers

by Tim Hunt -
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Two thoughts here: First, you could try the Cloze quetsion-type to build a question like this.

Second, it would be nice with the Essay question type, if teachers could provide a template for student's answers, so that when the student attempts the quiz, the edit box starts with that template, rather than being blank. I am pretty sure there is a feature request in the tracker for that, if you want to vote for it.

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In reply to Brian Mulligan

Re: Sketches within long answers

by Tim Hunt -
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People have thought about this, and it is possible in theory, as follows.

In Moodle 2.3, you have you upload new files using the File picker, and repository plugins. As well as the standard plugins like 'Upload a file' and 'My private files' etc, it is conceivable that someone could creat a new 'simple sketch' plugin, where instead of uploading a file, the user can draw with their mouse right there in the file-picker window.

Unfortunately, no-one has made that plugin yet. Arout the Moodle 1.9 time, we had a GSOC student, Mihai Sucan, who made a nice JavaScript sketching thing called PaintWeb (http://code.google.com/p/paintweb/ ) The theory was that once the Moodle 2.0 repository system was finished, PaintWeb would be made into a repository plugin. However, Moodle 2.0 took longer than expected, so that never happened. (I think Mihai got a job working on Firefox.)

Anyway, it could still be done, and if it was, then you could use a sketch anywhere in Moodle where you can upload a file (e.g. in a forum post). That would be very cool.

Similarly, people have tried to do 'record audio' or 'take a screen-grab' plugins. Have a look in the plugins DB.

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In reply to Brian Mulligan

Re: Sketches within long answers

by Justin Hunt -
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You can do this with the PoodLL recording question type. If you need you can even set a backimage for the student to draw over.

You can try it at demo.poodll.com . Login as a student, (this one will work, username 40 password: 40 ) In the PoodLL Recording Quiz, the third question is a whiteboard drawing. The first two are audio and video recording. You can probably just skip those. 

Actually this works in the PoodLL assignment submission type and the PoodLL repository (sans the backimage) too. Its available from the plugins database, but the assignment submission type can't be submitted because of a problem at Moodle's end, so you have to get it from http://www.poodll.com .

 

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In reply to Justin Hunt

Re: Sketches within long answers

by Brian Mulligan -

Thanks for the responses folk.  i'm not sure how th Cloze question could handle this as I don't know how you can allow the student to draw at will within text input.

The PoodLL would indicate that it could be built but again it is not quite as i imagine it needs to be. (to be able to draw at will)

I'm wondering if it would be reasonable to expect a student to be proficient in a drawing application (like Paint) and to use it whever they wished to insert Math or sketches (Draw, Save, Insert, Upload, Name....)

That was actually a bit time consuming. (I'm sure I could draw better with a graphics tablet - which we would expect them to have)

Brian

PS. It is a while since I used an essay question - I presume that it has rich text editing with the facility to insert an image.

 

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In reply to Brian Mulligan

Re: Sketches within long answers

by Joseph Rézeau -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Brian "I presume that it has rich text editing with the facility to insert an image."

Of course it does.approve

Joseph

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In reply to Brian Mulligan

Re: Sketches within long answers

by Justin Hunt -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Hi Brian, what do you mean by draw at will? If you mean free hand drawing, I think PoodLL pretty much does what you need. I just drew this ..

It won't work on tablets though. Not yet anyway.

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In reply to Justin Hunt

Re: Sketches within long answers

by Brian Mulligan -

Thanks, Bernard.

Geogebra looks great but it seems to be PC based and quite complicated - the user would need some training, I would imagine.  You would need to go through the same save, upload and insert process to get the sketches into a essay answer.  Perhaps, it wold be easiest to ask the student to answer the question in MS Word and upload the file.  thanks for the pointer anyway as I might be able to find other uses for GeoGebra.

Justin, by "draw at will" i mean that the candidate would while in the middle of writing an essay question easily create a simple sketch (just like you might in Word or a Google Doc).

Brian

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Re: Sketches within long answers

by Jean-Michel Védrine -

Hello Brian,

Tim  already spoke of Paintweb.

As moodle 2.4 now support plugin in the TinyMCE editor, the best solution would be to implement Paintweb as a tinyMCE plugin, then students would be able to do exactly what you want "while in the middle of writing an essay question easily create a simple sketch" just clicking on a new button in the ditor toolbar.

I seems to remember that after GSOC finised somebody else continued the unfinished Paintweb integration, but I don't think it was released.

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In reply to Jean-Michel Védrine

Re: Sketches within long answers

by Brian Mulligan -

Thom and Jean-Michel.

thanks for the heads-up on TinyMCE editor.  It seems that gives me a few options.  This community is great - it really helps me impress my boss smile - he thinks I know so much.  Only joking, guys, I'll tell him you helped me.

Brian

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Re: Sketches within long answers

by Justin Hunt -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

I really am sorry to keep saying "PoodLL does this." So I won't say it anymore. This is a video of me drawing straight into an Essay question from the PoodLL repository in the HTML editor. It is only 3 mins long.

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In reply to Justin Hunt

Re: Sketches within long answers

by Brian Mulligan -

justin,

My apologies - I may have misunderstood the possibilities - the video explained perfectly.  This is exactly along the lines of what I'm looking for.  It is not absolutely perfect but nearly and way better than any other solution I have seen so far.  The only faults I would suggest, and they are small ones: the steps in creating and inserting an image are a little longer than I would like, and the drawing area is a bit small (I am using Google Docs as a reference in my mind).  Still, I think it is better than my other option of telling students to go into another application and work in that.

Thanks a million for going to the trouble to show me that.

Brian

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In reply to Brian Mulligan

Re: Sketches within long answers

by Thom Rawson -
Sorry to jump in here, Brian.

What Justin is saying is that PoodLL has a sketchpad repository which can be accessed from the Moodle TinyMCE editor. You open the sketchpad repository (click on the Moodle Media button, choose PoodLL Sketchpad, draw a picture) and then that gets inserted into the text.

So what you are asking for is already available if you install PoodLL. Not sure what other functionality you'd be looking for there. I'm sure tablet functionality is in the development path for PoodLL so it won't be long before that works as well.

Hope that clears it up a little. Feel like the message wasn't getting across there.
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In reply to Brian Mulligan

Re: Sketches within long answers

by Bernard Boucher -

Hi Brian,

             depending of your Moodle version and of the complexity required Geogebra may be a good candidate.

I hope it may help,

 

Bernard

 

 

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