Hot Potatoes™

The Hot Potatoes™ software suite is a set of six authoring tools enabling the creation of interactive activities in a variety of styles that can run smoothly in any web browser.
In addition, media objects such as sound and video can be incorporated into the activities.

Full information about the software including download and licence requirements is available on the Hot Potatoes™ website.

The six Hot Potatoes activities are:

• JCloze: used to create gap-fill (cloze) exercises.

• JQuiz: used to create question-based exercises consisting of an unlimited number of questions. Multiple choice, short answer, hybrid and multi-select are the four basic types of question.

• JCross: used to create crossword exercises. It is possible to create a crossword of up to 20 x 20 letters.

• JMatch: used to create matching or ordering exercises. JMatch contains three types of output format – standard, drag-and-drop, flashcard.

• JMix: used to create jumbled word or sentence exercises. Letters of a single word may be jumbled, or the words of a sentence.

• The Masher: used to build linked units of resources. A unit created with the Masher can share the same appearance settings and be linked automatically by navigation buttons, and it includes an automatically created index page.

This section deals with creating activities using Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional operating software and Half Baked Software Inc. Hot Potatoes™ version 6 software. You may want to repurpose these materials to suit your own computer environment, and you may find there are slight variations between software versions, but the principles remain consistent.

There are three main steps to creating an exercise in any of the Hot Potatoes™ suite:

1. Create the questions and answers.
   
   
2. Configure the output of the activity: instructions for use, labels for buttons, links to other exercises or web pages.
   
   
3. Create the web page by converting the exercise to HTML pages, so that the student can view and complete the activity.

NB: Hot Potatoes™ software does not have to be installed on the end user’s computer because the resources are created in html format and therefore can be viewed using any internet browser.