Hi everybody! I hope you’ve all been doing well over the past three months. In this newsletter, I’ve included the following important updates about ChemQuiz.net:
- *NEW* Continuous questions mode for all quizzes!
- Lots of other *NEW* features – dark mode, assignment tags, sig fig explanations
- Site licenses for 2024-2025 school year
- Bug fixes and other improvements
There’s a lot to cover and I know many of you are already starting a new school year, so I’ll get right to it!
*NEW* Continuous questions mode!
I’ve added a new “Continuous” mode that will generate unlimited questions for your students, one at a time, and provide immediate feedback after each question. The Dashboard will keep track of their total score and append each question and response to their results so you can review them. Here’s an example from the Significant Figures Quiz that also demonstrates the new “Dark mode” feature:
One benefit of Continuous mode is that you can set a threshold on the assignment so that students will still have to answer enough questions correctly in order to complete the assignment but they get as many tries as they need in order to do it. I’m hoping that this decreases student anxiety and gives them more encouragement to try without worrying about getting questions wrong (shout-out to my fellow Phil Schlechty fans – you know who you are!) I plan on using this new feature in my own classes this upcoming school year for in-class practice and formative assessment.
Continuous mode can be activated on any assignment by selecting it under “Number of items” when you create or edit an assignment in the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard:
It’s also available on all quizzes on PhysQuiz.net! I’ve activated Continuous mode on the Significant Figures Quiz for everyone who wants to try it out. Please note that Continuous mode disables a few assignment features such as limiting attempts and saving progress (since it already saves each question), and it’s not available for exams. Let me know what you think of the new feature, and thanks to Jason, Don and Malcolm for the suggestions and inspiration!
Lots of other *NEW* features!
I’ve also added a number of other new features to ChemQuiz.net that I hope you and your students will like! Here’s a quick rundown:
- dark mode† available on all quizzes and the Dashboard (see above)
- explanations for sig fig problems† (also see above)
- assignment tags*† for better organization (see below)
- view saved student progress*† on an assignment in the Dashboard before it’s submitted (see below)
- new layout for Types of Matter Quiz justification questions (see below)
- include and exclude specific items* on the Laboratory Equipment Quiz in the Dashboard
FYI new features that are marked with an asterisk (*) are only available to schools with an active ChemQuiz.net Dashboard site license; new features that are marked with a dagger (†) are also available on PhysQuiz.net.
Site licenses for the 2024-2025 school year
Speaking of site licenses – thank you to everyone who has purchased or renewed their school’s site license for the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard for the 2024-2025 school year! Site licenses help me pay for the web hosting and software I use to write the quizzes, and it keeps the website ad-free. This past school year, ChemQuiz.net averaged about 1 million visits per month, and 18,396 students from 210 schools in six countries completed 372,177 assignments on the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard. The site’s popularity has grown beyond my wildest expectations!
If you would like to purchase a site license for the 2024-2025 school year for just US$70, you can do so right now in one of the following ways:
- credit card through Square (the most popular option)
- school purchase order (contact me for a sales quote – I’m also happy to fill out any paperwork required by your institution or state, and I’m now an officially registered business in New Jersey, too! 😂)
- personal check
- CashApp, PayPal, Venmo or Zelle at chris@chemquiz.net
Additional schools in the same district can purchase an add-on license for 50% off at just US$35 per school. If your school offers physics, you can bundle a site license for the PhysQuiz.net Dashboard for just US$35 more! Please contact me if you have any questions about how to purchase a site license.
Site licenses also help me offer the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard for free to 150 public schools in the United States with high rates of poverty. If you teach in a high poverty public 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 ChemQuiz.net Dashboard forever (PhysQuiz.net, too!).
Bug fixes & other improvements
Besides Continuous mode, the biggest update this summer was invisible, because I spent a LOT of time preparing the site for a major upgrade of PHP, the web server software that powers everything on ChemQuiz.net! This should make the website run faster and more securely. Unfortunately, the upgrade broke some quizzes and a few Dashboard features when I performed the upgrade in early July, but I’ve tracked down a lot of them thanks to teachers who were using the site over the summer and reached out when something wasn’t working properly.
Here are all of the updates I’ve made since the last newsletter I sent back in May:
Everywhere
- new feature: “Dark mode” (thanks to my son for the suggestion!)
Dashboard – these features and bug fixes also apply to PhysQuiz.net!
- new feature: added class and tag filter menus to improve assignment organization (thanks, Matthew!)
- improvement: can now view student progress on an assignment even though it hasn’t been turned in yet (thanks, Vilma & Danielle!)
- bug fix: teachers could create student accounts that weren’t email addresses through CSV roster import (thanks, Stephanie!)
- bug fix: CSV results export wasn’t working after PHP upgrade (thanks, Corey!)
- bug fix: displaying student deletion confirmation form would cause Dashboard to crash due to incorrectly formatted count() function (thanks, Jason!)
- bug fix: “Time to Complete” in student result details was off by 5 hours (thanks, Nick!)
- bug fix: most recent results were not showing up due to a miscalculation in the number of Results pages
- bug fix: student usernames would not show up across the Dashboard if student did not have a first & last name saved in the Dashboard
All Quizzes
- improvement: Presentation mode is now available to everyone on all quizzes
- improvement: custom assignment names are now displayed in web browser tab title
- bug fix: decimal values with multiple zeros after the decimal point sometimes had the distance from the decimal calculated incorrectly
- bug fix: disabled multiprotic weak acids in weak acid-strong base problems (thanks, Scott!)
- bug fix: multiple choice distractors were not very random
Concentrations & Colligative Properties of Solutions Quiz
- bug fix: van ‘t Hoff factor was being excluded from vapor pressure lowering problems (thanks, Mary Ann!)
- bug fix: weak acids were being included in problems where the number of ions produced in solution mattered (thanks again, Mary Ann!)
- bug fix: correct answers weren’t being rounded correctly, which sometimes affected scoring (thanks, Michele!)
- bug fix: blank word problems were being generated for some freezing point depression problems (thanks, Andrew!)
- bug fix: dilution problems were sometimes being generated with moles as the solution unit (thanks, John!)
- bug fix: short incorrect answers (less than three characters) would crash the quiz
- bug fix: monohydrate compounds were crashing the quiz when they were randomly selected for a problem
- bug fix: half-life calculations were using the double precision value randomly generated by the quiz for At instead of the value displayed in the problem that was rounded to 3 sig figs, leading to mathematically valid answers being scored as incorrect (thanks, Mary Ann!)
- improvement: added an advanced option in the Dashboard to include specific categories of equipment and exclude specific pieces of equipment (thanks, Tonda!)
- bug fix: attempting to load saved student progress crashed the quiz in certain situations if gases were involved (thanks, Matthew!)
Naming Compounds & Calculating Molar Masses Quiz
- improvement: column widths on the quiz page were behaving strangely
- bug fix: test code was being displayed when it should have been removed (thanks, Matthew!)
- bug fix: blank answers were being graded using the last values entered by the student instead of being automatically marked wrong
- bug fix: scientific notation formatting for student answers on the results page was not consistent with what they entered
- new feature: added explanations (solutions) for counting and arithmetic problems
- improvement: added parentheses around scientific notation values in math problems (thanks, Tony!)
Stoichiometry & Limiting Reagents Quiz
- bug fix: percent yield problems were crashing the quiz due to backward compatibility code that needed to be updated (thanks, Debbie!)
- improvement: changed how justification questions are displayed so that the quiz is compatible with the new Continuous mode
Other improvements
- improvement: updated PHP to latest version
- bug fixes: many code updates and improvements necessitated by server software upgrade this summer
- maintenance: archived all assignments, classes, student accounts and results from the 2023-2024 school year
Thanks to everyone who sent in a suggestion or bug report, and please keep submitting your suggestions and bug reports! With the server upgrade and the new features I’ve added, there are bound to be things that don’t work as properly as they should. The sooner I find out about a bug, the sooner I can fix it!
Help me share ChemQuiz.net with the world!
If you like using ChemQuiz.net, there are three quick and easy things that you can do to help me promote the site!
- Add your school to the list of supporters on the About page! Simply go to the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard, click on “Your Info” in the top menu bar, activate the box next to “Display School on ChemQuiz.net“, and click the “Update Your Info” button.
- Tell another Chemistry teacher about ChemQuiz.net and encourage them to try out the Dashboard!
- Follow @ChemQuizDotNet on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Threads and share my updates with your fellow Chemistry teachers!
I wanted to thank everyone who completed the end-of-year survey this past Spring! The teachers in the survey gave me a lot of useful feedback on the site, and their suggestions have helped me prioritize what improvements I should focus on for this upcoming school year. On a related note, I was selected as an AP scorer, so I spent a week in June scoring hundreds of AP Computer Science A FRQs, and that mind-numbing experience of trying to interpret handwritten code for eight hours a day honestly helped me a lot with my own coding skills. I’m really excited about all the possibilities for ChemQuiz.net this school year!
In the May newsletter, I wrote about how I was going to take our school’s Environmental Club to the Ohio Envirothon Competition. The “EnviroQueens” ended up earning 3rd place in Oral Presentation and 6th place overall out of 20 teams from across the state! Most importantly, we all had a great time – even the student who got a very, very flat tire on the way down to Nelsonville. It was a wonderful way for these awesome seniors to cap off their high school careers, and I’m going to miss them all as they go off to college in the Fall! 😭
Thanks for letting me brag about my students, and thanks again to everyone for all of your support, suggestions and feedback over the past four years! You’ve all been very kind to me. Please reach out any time via the Contact form or at chris@chemquiz.net if you have any questions, comments, or concerns. Take care, stay safe, and good luck with this school year!
-Chris