Hello again! I hope this email finds you well, and I hope that the 2021-2022 school year is wrapping up or has already wrapped up for you. I know that this was a challenging year for a lot of teachers, including me and my colleagues where I teach, so it’ll be nice to disconnect and get some physical and mental rest this summer.
Website stats
This school year has seen a lot of success for ChemQuiz.net! The site has seen about 3.6 million hits over the last calendar year, and it frequently gets over 2,000 unique visitors per day. The top three most popular quizzes on the site, based on total visits so far, are:
- Naming Compounds & Calculating Molar Masses Quiz – 1.2 million visits
- Balancing, Identifying & Predicting Chemical Equations Quiz – 768,000 visits
- Significant Figures Quiz – 577,000 visits
The least popular quiz is the Solubility Quiz, with only 4,686 visits over the past two years. Poor thing – I guess no one likes solubility!
Additionally, there have been 21,613 quiz results recorded on the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard since July 1st of last year, and overall, over 417,000 quizzes have been taken on the site since I started counting on January 15 of this year. It seems likely that the site is providing a million randomly generated chemistry quizzes each calendar year, which is just incredible to think about. It wouldn’t have been possible without your support!
Site license renewals
Site licenses for the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard are how I pay for the web hosting and the software I use to write the quizzes, and it keeps the website ad-free. You may have noticed that the site’s hosting was upgraded over winter break and loads much faster now, and that was paid for with the money from site licenses. I’ve already sent out invoices to all of my current paying customers for next school year, but if you didn’t receive one, please let me know.
If you have a demo account and would like to purchase a site license for the 2022-2033 school year for just $US50, you can purchase it through a school purchase order or personal check, or via CashApp, PayPal, Venmo or Zelle at chris@chemquiz.net, or I can send you an invoice through Square for a credit card payment. If you have any questions at all about site licenses or how to purchase one, please reach out to me at any time!
As always, I am strongly committed to helping students at economically disadvantaged public schools in the United States learn chemistry and science. There are currently 70 schools or school districts that are receiving a free site license to the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard for this reason. If you teach in a high poverty public high school or school district (at least 50% of your students on free/reduced lunch or designated “economically disadvantaged”), please send me a link to the supporting documentation and you’ll get a free site license for the Dashboard. For what it’s worth, I verify demographics through the U.S. News High School Rankings website, so you can just send me the link to your school on there to speed up the process. (BTW I hate the term “economically disadvantaged” because I feel it obfuscates the real reasons behind larger societal problems, but that’s a rant for another day.)
Summer maintenance
The ChemQuiz.net Dashboard has now accumulated over 6,000 users, some of whom last used the site over a year ago, so I’m going to be performing the following maintenance items over the summer, starting on or shortly after July 1st:
- All quiz results before June 30th will be archived (but not deleted)
- All assignments before June 30th will be archived (but not deleted)
- All student accounts created during the 2021-2022 school year (7/1/21 – 6/30/22) will be archived (but not deleted)
- All student accounts created during the 2020-2021 school year will be deleted
If you don’t want me to archive your stuff, or if you operate on a different school calendar, please let me know before July 1st!
End of school year survey
Last year, I asked every teacher that uses or has signed up for the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard to complete a short survey about how they used the site and what they wanted to see in the future. The feedback I received was really helpful, so if you wouldn’t mind, it would be great if you took a moment to fill out this year’s survey here: https://forms.gle/QY7NUHJeV3goLCP4A
New quizzes coming
I received a LOT of requests for new quizzes and features this school year, and thanks to your suggestions, I was able to add five new quizzes, bringing the total to 26 quizzes about chemistry and other fundamental science topics! Three of the most common requests for new quizzes have been for VSEPR, redox, and reaction rates, so those are the topics I’m planning to tackle as soon as my Environmental Club is done with the State Envirothon Competition in early June. I’ve documented every request that has been sent in, so I’ll do my best to write quizzes for each of the topics that I think will be the most useful for teachers and students.
I also added some new features and fixed some bugs based on emails and bug reports that were sent in, so please keep those coming! Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to squish all of the bugs during the school year, but I have everything documented and I’m going to do my best to fix all of them in the upcoming weeks. If you ever come across something on the site that doesn’t work properly, please don’t hesitate to let me know!
New features coming
I have some new features planned for ChemQuiz.net that I think will make the site more useful for you and your students! One suggestion that I think is an excellent idea is for teachers to be able to create quiz assignments that don’t require students to log in to the Dashboard. This is great for quick practice with the settings you specify without worrying about having kids log in first. Another feature that I’m going to add for Dashboard users is exporting quizzes as CSV files so that you can import them into some of the other great education websites out there such as Quizlet, Gimkit and Kahoot. I have some other additions and enhancements planned, so keep your eyes peeled!
PhysQuiz.net?
Last year, on a whim, I purchased the domain name PhysQuiz.net after one of my CS students asked me for help with physics and told me that I should start writing physics quizzes as well. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to do anything with it during the school year, but now that summer break is approaching, I was thinking about putting together some physics quizzes in the same style of ChemQuiz.net. If you’re interested in being contacted if and when I get PhysQuiz.net up and running, please send me an email at chris@chemquiz.net and I’ll keep you in the loop.
Thanks again for all of your support, suggestions and feedback over the past two years! It’s been really exciting to see this little hobby take on a life of its own. I hope you’ve found ChemQuiz.net to be useful for you and your students during this school year, and I hope it continues to be useful in the future! As always, please feel free to let me know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns. If you’re in the United States, I hope you have a restful and peaceful Memorial Day. Take care, stay safe, and enjoy your summer break!
-Chris