quiz

26 Aug

Reflections on Google Summer of Code

Posted by matt in drupal, google, gsoc, querypath, quiz

This was the second year that I have been involved as a mentor for Google's Summer of Code program. And in both cases, I've worked as a mentor for Drupal. Last year, I worked with sivaji on a project involving the Quiz module. This year, I worked with eabrand on QueryPath and the QueryPath module.

In both cases, the projects were highly successful. I'm thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with two very gifted up-and-coming developers.

I think one of the most critical questions to ask of any program like GSOC, is whether or not it produces the results (pedagogical and professional) that it is after. With both Sivaji and Emily, the answer is a resounding yes.

  • Since finishing his GSOC project, Sivaji has begun his professional life as a web developer focused on Drupal. Recently, he and his colleagues started E-ndicus, a Drupal-focused software development company in his home town of Chennai.
  • Emily is now a software engineer at HP. She continues to contribute to QueryPath, and was just this week featured on Google's blog. Last week, she joined me on the Drupal Dojo QueryPath session, too.

I doubt either of these individuals learned much from me during our GSOC projects. More than anything, it just takes hard work, persistence, and attention to detail to finish a GSOC project. But I've certainly learned a lot from them. And both Quiz and QueryPath have benefited enormously from the work of these two.

15 May

Drupal Quiz 3.0 Alpha 2 released

Posted by matt in drupal, quiz

Drupal Quiz 3.0 Alpha 2 is now released.

The major news for this release is that it has gotten three big new features:

  • A new Matching question type has been added.
  • A new Short answer question type has been added (and it offers fill-in-the-blank-like functionality)
  • QTI (Question & Test Interoperability) XML, version 1.2, can now be imported by Question Import.

Here are some screenshots of the new question types:
MatchingMatchingShort answerShort answer

08 May

Drupal Quiz 3.0 Alpha released

Posted by matt in drupal, quiz, release

An Alpha release of the Drupal Quiz 3.0 module has been released. This new version adds the following features:

New Quiz UI (3.0)New Quiz UI (3.0)

  • New Administrative UI
    • Drag-and-drop quiz reorganizing
    • Autocomplete question lookup
  • A JavaScript enabled quiz timer
  • Multiple question types
    • Long answer
    • Question directions
    • True/False
  • A question importer
  • Complete Views 2 support
  • An object-oriented framework for adding question types
  • CCK integration
  • Many bugs fixed
  • Many more

To download the new release, go to http://drupal.org/project/quiz

And if you find a bug, please report it!

08 May

Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) and Drupal Quiz

Posted by matt in drupal, qti, quiz

The Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) standard is an XML-based data interchange format for test questions. The standard has gone through several revisions, with the QTI 1p2 standard being the most widely implemented. This week, the Drupal Quiz team has begun adding QTI support to Drupal.

My current implementation takes a QTI XML file and extracts the questions. It then attempts to match the question types against existing Quiz question types. Data is imported into Drupal nodes, and the questions immediately show up for addition in new quizzes.

In parallel to my efforts, Sivaji has been developing the Questions Import module, which provides a standard module for importing data into Quiz. Now that I have a working version, we will try to integrate the two together (if Sivaji deems that practical). The result, I hope, will be an improve QTI XML importer.

Next Steps

Once this importer is complete, we will need Quiz users to test against their own QTI files. I have a very small set of QTI files to test, and the "interoperability" part is only good when we can test against multiple implementations. Visit http://drupal.org/project/quiz for more information.