The AppletQuiz Applet

Why AppletQuiz?

Many years ago, I wrote a test-generator program in Pascal. I wrote it for my own use, and I used it a lot. Something that I was always going to do was to write an interactive program that would use questions generated by my program, that students could use for interactive pretests and practice. I never quite got that part of the job done.

A few years ago, my school switched to the Mac platform, and instead of porting my test generator to the Mac, I purchased a copy of the MicroTest test generator program - I have:

MicroTest Version 4.1.2, by David Brown and Manuel Silveira, copyright © 1985 - 1995 by Chariot Software Group

Since I thought that MicroTest was better than my Pascal efforts, but it also had no interactive component, I began to "play around" with the project in the C++ language.

When I found Java and HTML and began writing web pages for my classes, I thought that a Java applet would be just what I needed for an interactive quiz - thus AppletQuiz was born. I started using a primitive version of AppletQuiz in my web site about two years ago.

Development of the AppletQuiz applet proceeded extremely slowly, since I could only work on it in my spare time, and I have no spare time. Fortunately, I was given a generous grant by the

John W. Hillenbrand VISION Fund for Quality Education

which allowed me to devote a summer to developing the applet. I have been able to add the short-answer question type, as well as all of the "bells and whistles" in the applet thanks to the support of the VISION Fund.

I have continued to add features to the AppletQuiz applet, which is now version 3.0

last update April 10, 1999 by JL Stanbrough (jstanbro@venus.net)