Hot Potatoes
The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is freeware, and you may use it for any purpose or project you like. It is not open-source. The Java version provides all the features found in the windows version, except: you can't upload to hotpotatoes.net and you can't export a SCORM object from Java Hot Potatoes.
The tools provided by this software are similar to some iDevice in the eXelearning platform, so you can use Hot Potatoes to integrate it or to produce quiz or other self learning material as an independent package.
Downloads
Download Hot Potatoes for Windows from here:
- Hot Potatoes 6.3 installer (Hot Potatoes for Windows 98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista, version 6.3).
- Hot Potatoes for Linux users running Wine (version 6.3). This is a zip file containing the folder structure of the Windows version of Hot Potatoes. You can extract this to create the HotPot program folder without running the setup program if you prefer.
Download Java Hot Potatoes:
- Download Java Hot Potatoes which will run on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux or any computer running a Java Virtual Machine. To install and run Java Hot Potatoes on Mac OS X:
- Download the file javahotpot61.zip from the link above.
- Unzip that file on your computer, you will have a folder called JavaHotPot6.
- Drag the JavaHotPot6 folder to the Applications directory on your computer.
- Open the folder and double-click the JavaHotPotatoes6 application icon.
- Trash the javahotpot61.zip file.
When you first start up Hot Potatoes, it will ask you for your user name. This name is stored on your computer, and not sent to anyone; it will be inserted into your exercises to identify you as the author. You must provide a user name before you can use all the features of 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:
- Create the questions and answers.
- Configure the output of the activity: instructions for use, labels for buttons, links to other exercises or web pages.
- 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.
File Attachments
You have here the installation file included in this course package. If you own an Internet connection, you can go online and check if an updated version of the programme is available
Download Hot Potatoes
for Windows from here:
- Hot Potatoes 6.3 installer (Hot Potatoes for Windows 98/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista, version 6.3).
- Hot Potatoes for Linux users running Wine (version 6.3). This is a zip file containing the folder structure of the Windows version of Hot Potatoes. You can extract this to create the HotPot program folder without running the setup program if you prefer.
Java Hot Potatoes:
- Download Java Hot Potatoes which will run on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux or any computer running a Java Virtual Machine. To install and run Java Hot Potatoes on Mac OS X:
- Download the file javahotpot61.zip from the link above.
- Unzip that file on your computer, you will have a folder called JavaHotPot6.
- Drag the JavaHotPot6 folder to the Applications directory on your computer.
- Open the folder and double-click the JavaHotPotatoes6 application icon.
- Trash the javahotpot61.zip file.
When you first start up Hot Potatoes, it will ask you for your user name. This name is stored on your computer, and not sent to anyone; it will be inserted into your exercises to identify you as the author. You must provide a user name before you can use all the features of Hot Potatoes.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0