One to watch in its early stages here:
Moodle HQ developer John Okely has made a plugin for turning quiz questions into a retro-spaceship-like-shooting game. It's currently "proof of concept" and available from his github, but your admin can install it in the usual way, very easily, and it's simple to set up. Basically, when you add an instance of the Quizventure into your course, it will pick up all the multiple choice questions in your question bank and build them into the game. I made a grammar one:
(Actually, I was going to make a mini screencast demonstrating it until I realised I was totally hopeless at the game )
So if you are a teacher with students who enjoy playing such games, it's a simple and fun activity to consolidate knowledge. Last term I took a group of ten 14 year old boys once a week and worked with them to create Moodle quiz questions for a Functional Skills ICT course they were doing. We looked at what made a "good" quiz question, how to create questions in Moodle and how to turn them into a quiz and then they tried out each others' quizzes and peer -assessed them. I can well imagine these boys would be delighted to play the game with their quiz questions (which they are happy for me to share eventually on Moodle.net .)
Caveats: there are no sound effects and you can't choose the questions, but it's worth keeping an eye on...
Looks great Mary, I can't wait to try.
If I may digress slightly from the game but pick up on something you mentioned - I was asked by a member of staff if they could get their kids to create quiz questions within Moodle. Is that possible (and safe to do) by tweaking a permission of the student role in the course? Did your students create the Questions in Moodle?
I suggested that the students could write their questions on paper/or in MS Word and then for the teacher to input them into Moodle but we both agreed that doing it directly in Moodle would be ideal.
Thanks.
However... you can give them the Question creator role within the course (with caveats) and the documentation is here ( I need to update it a bit but it should be fairly clear) Question creator role
There is also the question creation plugin, which was originally created by Jamie Pratt, and which Jean-Michel Vedrine is updating to work with the latest version of Moodle https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=13707#p1149005
Thanks Tim! That looks really interesting. From what I understand of the research, getting learners to write questions and tests for each other is a highly effective strategy for both learning and assessment: learners' writing questions is more detailed, revealing, and representative of learners' knowledge of a subject/topic/concept than answering teacher/examiner written questions. I've used it in face-to-face classes extensively and would love to see an online adaptation in Moodle.
BTW, if the teacher doesn't "correct/check" any of the learners' questions and the course provides an avenue for feedback and discussion about them, e.g. a forum, chat, or webinar, learners can then teach/inform each other about what was "good" and "bad" about each others' questions, e.g. answer didn't match the question, too easy, too difficult, off topic, or incomprehensible language ("I didn't understand the question").
Learner written tests can provide numerous opportunities for learning.
The Space invaders quiz looks great!
Last year I saw a demo of a similar question creator Moodle plugin called 'The reading game' being used at Sydney Macquarie University. Students create the multiple choice questions and then rate the quality of each other's questions.
"The unusual presentation of the questions, the points, the progress bar, the stars, the rating system and how questions are answered, are designed using game thinking (Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011) rather than a traditional pedagogical model." http://www.ascilite.org/conferences/sydney13/program/papers/Parker.pdf
They were hopeful of sharing the code but I can't find it online anywhere. This was being used with hundreds of students and getting excellent results (wish I could see that data!)
This concept of creating and rating questions is also used by Stanford SMILE project which has been tested and used Internationally with great results in young children. When an educational strategy works across different ages and cultures we are really tapping into something powerful.
What you describe sounds like the stand-alone system Peerwise (http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/). It would be great if something like that was available as a Moodle add-on.
The game is awesome, but for some reason my score always give negative points. Wrong answers earn -900 and correct earn -1000. I've searched through the code, but can't figure out why this is happening. I'm using 3.0.1. Does anyone else have this issue?
Funny how you figure these things out once you post about them. Lol. Anyway, it had to do with the grade settings. If you have the wrong answers set to give -100% on a quiz, then it makes all the points go negative on the game. I just set the correct answer to + 100% and all the rest to none.
This is a great plug-in and plan to use it quite a bit. There is a small issue if the question stem is a little long because the Score overlaps the question text. Is it possible to move the score down to the bottom right or left?
I am running into the same problem, but my kids LOVE the game!
To Christopher and Rob: the game is available from the Moodle plugins directory here and you can make comments there - why not add a comment about this issue there?