ChemQuiz.net

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you’re all doing well, staying safe, and managing your sanity during this challenging school year. After having some time to work on ChemQuiz.net over Winter Break, I wanted to send you an update to let you know about three new quizzes and a bunch of new features that I hope will make your lives a little easier.

First, the three new quizzes in alphabetical order:

• Molar Conversions Quiz
  • convert between moles and a variety of units
  • chemical formulas or compound names; simple or word problems
• Isotope Naming & Notation Quiz
  • name isotopes, determine isotope notation and count number of subatomic particles for hundreds of isotopes
• Thermochemical Equations Quiz
  • over 100 thermochemical equations with heats of reactions
  • stoichiometry and limiting reagents problems
  • balanced and unbalanced equations; chemical formulas or names; grams and moles; percent yield
  • creating this quiz also added 192 new balanced chemical equations that are used by other quizzes for more variety!

I also added a new score correction feature to the Dashboard that allows you to override quiz items that ChemQuiz.net has erroneously marked as incorrect. Just view the quiz result details, check the box(es) next to the items you’d like to mark as correct, and click the “Save Update” button at the bottom of the page. You can also leave feedback (comments) on quiz results that can be viewed by your students just like in other learning management systems. Another new Dashboard feature is the ability to archive old quiz results so they don’t show up in the list any more unless you want them to be displayed. This has no impact on whether or not a student can see their quiz results, because students can’t currently archive their results. Finally, by request, teachers now have the ability to filter their quiz results by class.

In addition to these new features and quizzes, I made two quick bug fixes, one giving teachers the ability to disable assignment email notifications to students (this option wasn’t displaying correctly before), and some beta decays in the Nuclear Reactions Quiz were generating way too many products, resulting in questions that violated the law of conservation of matter. Oops! There were also some little bug fixes thanks to teacher and student feedback that were mostly focused on simple mistakes, like a student putting an extra space before or after an answer that resulted in an item being marked incorrect when it shouldn’t have been.

The last new feature that I’ve added – reference sheets! For decades I’ve given my students various handouts of equations, ions, etc., as have many of you, but a teacher contacted me asking for a list of the polyatomic ions used the Naming Chemical Compounds Quiz, so I uploaded my reference sheets to Google Drive, updated and tweaked them, and I’ve made them available to you to use with your students. You can make copies in Google Docs or download them as Word documents and modify them however you like, or you can just download them as PDFs and print them for use in your own classroom (if you’re currently teaching in person, like I am). There are reference sheets for ions, common chemical equations, and SI prefixes, but if I’ve left out an important topic, ion, or equation, please let me now!

Finally, check out these cool website visitor stats:

Today (January 5th, 2021) represents the day with the greatest number of hits and unique visitors since ChemQuiz.net began this past summer! You can also clearly see where Thanksgiving and especially Winter Break happened, which was great timing because I used that time to run all kinds of backend site maintenance. The most popular quiz to date? Naming Chemical Compounds, of course – the first one I wrote for my school blog so many years ago, which has had over 48,000 hits since August 1st.

I can’t thank you enough for all of your help finding and reporting bugs so I can fix them while also requesting features and suggesting new quizzes so that I can make the site better. If you’re new to ChemQuiz.net, here are some quick and easy things you can also do to help make the site more popular:

• tell other Chemistry teachers you know about ChemQuiz.net
• consider following my website account on Twitter at @ChemQuizDotNet
• add your school to the list of schools who are using ChemQuiz.net by checking the opt-in box in Dashboard > User Info and clicking “Update your info” (this only displays your school name on the About page)

I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy! We went back to face-to-face “hybrid” teaching today after temporarily going fully remote in early December, so with covid cases back on the rise due to the holidays, I’ve started wearing a KN95 mask under my cloth mask, and it was surprisingly comfortable compared to breathing through the PM2.5 carbon filters I inserted into my cloth masks for the first four months. They’re just so expensive – US$2 each in a 20 pack! – so if you have any hot tips for cheaper KN95’s, I’m all ears. Please feel free to drop me a line at any time at chris@chemquiz.net or by using the Contact form. Take care!
-Chris

Hello again!  I hope you’re all doing well and staying safe.  I know that most if not all of you have started back to school, whether it’s remote learning, “hybrid” or face-to-face, so I’m sure this has been a stressful time for all of us as we re-learn science teaching during the pandemic.

At my school, we just finished our third week of hybrid or “blended” learning, and the experience so far has been… interesting.  Because I see some students on Tuesday/Thursday, some on Wednesday/Friday, and some that are remote only, I have ten seating charts and fifteen rosters for five classes, so just keeping track of who’s supposed to be in which class on what day has been an adjustment.  Add in students who are sick and more who are quarantined (like our entire football team for 10 days!), and I’m just hoping that my students learn anything this school year without going crazy.  For those of you going back to face-to-face teaching soon, my main recommendation is that you should expect everything you do to take at least three times as long as it normally does, so do less, if possible.

Because of that, I haven’t been able to do much with ChemQuiz.net, except when I finally got caught up with my schoolwork this week, which was just in time for a MAJOR bug involving assignment email notifications!  A few of you wrote me and said your students were getting inundated with dozens and dozens of notifications, sometimes for assignments they’d already completed and sometimes for assignments that weren’t meant for them.  I’m terribly sorry that happened – I know that my kids (both my biological children and my students) are getting slammed right now with email notifications from Google Classroom, Remind, FlipGrid, you name it – so I’ve fixed that bug, along with another one that created duplicate accounts when students used a Registration code.  It turns out that spelling is important, not only in real life, but in programming as well! ??‍♂️

Thanks to your feedback, I’ve also fixed a number of other bugs:

• students could not retake quizzes even when the assignment was set to allow them to retake
• teachers couldn’t update student passwords
• student names were not sorting properly in the Dashboard > Users page due to capitalization issues
• any student answer with neptunium in the Nuclear Reactions Quiz was marked as wrong, even it was correct (that was a weird one!)

I’ve also been told that some students are not receiving ChemQuiz.net registration emails, either because their district blocks it or the email went to their Spam folder, so I wanted to let everyone know that I wrote lots of documentation for the website, including how to reset a student password.  However, you’re welcome to have students contact me, either by filling out the Contact form or by emailing me directly at chris@chemquiz.net, and I will gladly take care of their password issues for you.

There’s good news besides bug fixes.  Several of you have asked me to be able to filter and sort your Quiz Results and your Users list, so I was able to add those features today.  You can sort some columns by clicking on the header of that table, and you can filter results by class, student or assignment by using the dropdown menus.  I hope this helps you keep track of your students’ progress a little more easily!  The sorting feature involves JavaScript, which I’m really not good with, so if you’re having any issues with it, let me know.

If you feel ChemQuiz.net is useful for your students, please continue to tell other teachers about the site!  If you’re on Twitter, please consider following me at @ChemQuizDotNet.  I haven’t had the time to tweet much lately, but I hope to share tips and tricks for using the site in the near future.

One last fun fact: the most popular quiz on the site this past week was the Significant Figures Quiz, with over 5,000 visits!

This makes sense since sig figs are such an important fundamental concept in Chemistry (that every Chemistry student hates until they take a college lab course and finally understand why some numbers matters and others don’t).

Thanks again for all of your patience and support as I iron out the bugs and try to make ChemQuiz.net easier to use for teachers and their students.  I appreciate all of the feedback I’ve received so far, so please feel free to email me at chris@chemquiz.net if you’re having any issues or if you have an idea for a new feature or quiz.  Good luck this upcoming week, and stay safe!