How did it all start?
The idea for Quizinator was born in the back of an old High School cafeteria, during
a regional Science team competition. Our neighborhood’s High School has a very dedicated,
self-organized Science team with highly motivated students. These guys organize
their own meetings and meeting materials, which consist of piles of Science tests
with multiple choice questions. The competitions require them to study on their
own, as well as to get together on a weekly basis to go over these tests, which
eventually they use up and go over again. The main disadvantage of this study technique
is that they can’t rearrange the questions or prepare a different pool of questions
to study from.
With this problem in mind, we decided to create a simple online application that
the Science team members could use to add a library of multiple choice questions
and then prepare different tests from different sets of questions for each study
session. This application would allow them to not only produce and classify new
study material, but also print sheets for individual study time. Additionally, each
student could add to the pool of questions on their own while studying, increasing
the number of available questions to create alternate versions of tests for the
team sessions.
Quizinator Now...
As we developed our original simple application into Quizinator, we spoke to teachers
and instructors, obtaining ideas and advise on features that would be useful to
them in the preparation of documents for class work.
One of the points that was often brought up dealt with the difficulty in creating
different versions of the same questions or tests; that is, the ability to create
questions with alternate answers, and the flexibility to re-organize the questions
in a test in order to produce an alternate to the same document.
With all these suggestions in mind, we developed the core features for the current
free version of Quizinator, which allows the teacher to not only add and classify
an extensive library of questions, along with any images they might like to associate
with them, but also to have backup answers to multiple choice questions. The ability
to store multiple answers for the same question gives the instructor the flexibility
to create the same question with different selection of answers and as such change
the version of the question for each exam, as well as the order in which the questions
are presented. Among many other features offered as core Quizinator functions, creating
an answer key is one of the time-saving benefits that this simple web application
provides.
We began our journey to help a group of self-taught students, and realized that
Quizinator was a tool for helping these kids become their own teachers. Our development
team is currently focused on catering to teachers and instructors, and our objective
is to create an application that is user friendly and that facilitates the troublesome
job of document creation, storage, and management.
Where are we going?
We are working on several new approaches that will make using Quizinator even easier,
allowing teachers and instructors to put their efforts into the materials themselves,
instead of design and arrangement. In the near future, we will make available an
extensive inter-collaborative interface that will allow instructors to share their
question libraries with colleagues and create multiple user accounts within departmental
units, among other things. We are continuously taking into consideration the pressures
that the academic environment places on instructors and use this information in
the development of future Quizinator interfaces.
