When I go to the quiz, I'm overwhelmed by the number of choices in the popup, and find it difficult to find the right city. How about instead populating the popup with the correct city plus, say, half-a-dozen to a dozen other randomly selected other cities? (I realize that with repeated refreshes, a cheater could eventually eliminate all but the right choice...)
Also, going the other way is useful: "Lansing is the capital of which state?"
I'm also wondering about managing the data when a class scales it up. For example, I can imagine extending the data beyond the USA to include countries and their capitals. Now we need another column to indicate the region of interest for the quiz. Not too hard. Now let's imagine other sorts of quizzes, e.g., "Which of these 8 cities is NOT in South America?" Now each database row has another column listing major cities. And this, of course, is best handled relationally. My question is, how can the data be managed, and grown, by the students in an educationally relevant way?
I guess I'm wondering not only about partitioning the data, but also partitioning the learning. One way would be for each student (or small team) to maintain their own set of (largely identical) data. Another approach might be for each student (or team) to maintain different sets of data. And if these different datasets are to be related, students need to coordinate their efforts. (And then, layer in the various quizzes that could be developed...)
I haven't had the opportunity to teach programming yet, so I'm curious how those who have might approach the data-management aspect in this scenario Kirby is sketching.
John Miller
On Apr 12, 2005, at 3:42 AM, "Kirby Urner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
OK, so a next iteration of where I'm going with my little lesson about databases is here:
http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/geoquiz.html
It's still too dry -- needs some graphics, more splashes of color. But the
content is sort of there.
This is one of those pages you can browse fairly quickly or, if you want to
study for awhile, you've got source code for doing cgi scripts with MySQL
using Python.
Nothing fancy. It's the kind of code one naturally wants to improve.
Kirby
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