ChemQuiz.net

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.

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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

Hello everyone, and Happy New Year! I hope that you and yours have been able to stay safe and healthy during the pandemic. Now that 1st Semester is ending for many of us, I wanted to let you know about the improvements to ChemQuiz.net over the past few months.

Faster web hosting

First, and most importantly, I upgraded the hosting package for the website! The site should run much faster now, especially when lots of people are using it at once, so I’m hoping this improvement is noticeable and makes the site a little more user friendly. ChemQuiz.net‘s popularity has increased a lot, and the site has frequently had over 15,000 hits and 2,000 unique visitors each weekday since mid-September, which is WAY more than last school year. (Interestingly, the peak was on December 14th, 2021, when there were 2,984 unique visitors and 25,937 hits, so I’m guessing that was due to students preparing for 1st Semester Exams.) The site reached two million total hits to date in November 2021, the vast majority of which came since this past August, so it was definitely time for an upgrade! Thanks to everyone who purchased site licenses this school year so that I could pay for the upgrade. (Please note: as a result of the upgrade, email notifications for assignments are currently not working, but I should have them working soon.)

Three new quizzes

Next, there are three new quizzes since my last newsletter in August:

• Hess’s Law Quiz
• Lewis Dot Structures Quiz, and
• Light & Energy Quiz!

I hope you find them to be useful for your students. Those three quizzes were all requested by multiple teachers, so thank you to everyone who has contacted me with suggestions, because they really help me prioritize what to work on next. I have more new quizzes planned, so hopefully I’ll be able to find the time over the next few months to work on them.

New quiz features

Two notable quiz improvements: you can now generate empirical formula problems in the Mass Ratios & Percent Composition Quiz, so now it’s called the Mass Ratios, Percent Composition & Empirical Formulas Quiz. Also, I modified the Significant Figures Quiz so that it sometimes randomly adds a few extra zeroes past the decimal point, and you can include random units in problems to make them a little more realistic.

New Dashboard features

I added several new features to the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard, including the following:

• Make copies of existing assignments
• Export quiz results by class
• Export the highest quiz score for each student on a particular assignment
• Other visual and efficiency improvements

I also recorded several instructional videos for the Dashboard, and I added an “md5 hash” to check if students were using the back button to check and fix their answers on quiz assignments (so you may have heard from one of your students if they tried doing that recently!).

Lots of bug fixes

Of course, there wouldn’t be a ChemQuiz.net update without bug fixes – there currently are 46,000 lines of custom code for the quizzes and other scripts that run the site! – so here’s a list of what I was able to squish with your help:

• existing student accounts were getting corrupted when they tried to join another class; the registration form now checks to make sure an existing student is logged in before allowing them to join a class by using a join code
• the registration form was grabbing the wrong user ID when creating a new account with a join code
• several Dashboard specific bugs:
  • archived classes were showing up on assignment form
  • some assignment settings were wiped out immediately after the assignment was created
  • the “Show individual students” link wasn’t working on the Create Assignment form
  • student names were shown as “First Last” in Quiz Results; “Last, First” made more sense
  • assigning quizzes to “All of your classes” didn’t work properly; I changed the way assignments are linked to classes and students in the database
• Quiz specific bugs:
  • Calorimetry Quiz: sometimes it generated a problem that tried to divide by zero, which would crash the quiz entirely
  • Concentrations of Solutions Quiz: word problems weren’t showing up at all
  • Elements & Isotopes Quiz: giving the wrong answers (whoops!)
  • Molar Conversions Quiz: units weren’t showing up on word problems and in the printable web page
  • Naming Compounds & Calculating Molar Masses Quiz: polyatomic ions went missing from the options (sorry!)
  • SI Conversions Quiz: wanted units weren’t showing up in the printable version
  • Significant Figures Quiz: adding & subtracting problems didn’t display properly, especially in scientific notation

+ lots of under-the-hood improvements!

If you come across any other bugs, please let me know and I’ll do my best to fix them!

Equity and opportunity

This school year has been much more difficult than many of us anticipated, including me, so I wanted to celebrate the fact that there are currently 45 high-poverty public schools signed up for ChemQuiz.net, which means 54 teachers and their 762 students are able to access the Dashboard LMS at no cost to themselves or their schools. If you purchased a site license, you’ve helped me pay for the web hosting, SSL certificate, domain registration and other business costs that allow me to give free site licenses to schools that have the fewest resources. There’s a lot of student talent out there in all kinds of places, so I’m hoping that ChemQuiz.net will help more students do well in Chemistry and realize their full potential. Thanks for helping make this possible!

Discounts, for a limited time!

In the spirit of making the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard available to more chemistry students, for those of you who haven’t yet purchased a site license for this school year, I’m now offering a discounted rate of just US$30 through July 1st, 2022! With a site license, you’ll be able to create accounts for all of your students and create as many quiz assignments as you’d like, which lets you track your students’ progress as they master different chemistry skills in line with your own curriculum. More info about the Dashboard is available here.

For existing customers, as a show of my sincere gratitude for your support so far, you can renew your license for next school year now through April 1st for only US$40, which is a 20% discount from the normal rate! This will help me secure the upgraded web hosting for next school year so that the site remains fast and accessible for as many people as possible.

One last thing – if you have a site license, make sure you have your school listed on the “About ChemQuiz.net” page by going to the Dashboard, clicking on “Your Info”, and then checking the box next to “Display School on ChemQuiz.net” and clicking the pink “Update your info” button. (Please note that this is completely optional but it does help support the site for free.)

Thanks!

Thanks again for all of your feedback, suggestions and support! When I started ChemQuiz.net in the summer of 2020, I never could have imagined that it would have grown to have so many teachers and students using it every day. Working on the site has been a true source of joy for me during such a difficult time. As always, take care, stay safe, and keep in touch!

-Chris

Hello there! I hope you’ve been able to take the summer to relax and recharge for this upcoming school year.

First, I’d like to thank you for your support over the past school year. ChemQuiz.net went from being an idea I was tossing around with a few of my colleagues during the 2020 lockdown to an educational website that has added over 1,000 users and has had over 900,000 hits! I’ve truly been humbled by the positive feedback and constructive criticism I’ve received during that time. Numerous teachers (you know who you are!) requested new quizzes, suggested new features and pointed out lots of bugs that helped me improve the site and allow me to focus on doing something positive instead of worrying about covid-19 and what school would look like in the fall.

Several of you have already signed up for site licenses, which is awesome! If you had a free account last year but your school isn’t “economically disadvantaged” (I hate that term, btw) with at least 50% of your students on free/reduced lunch, please consider purchasing a site license this school year for only $50. Website hosting isn’t free, so my first goal by selling site licenses is to break even, and then I’m planning to upgrade the hosting so that ChemQuiz.net runs much faster and can support thousands more Chemistry students and their teachers. I can accept payment through Venmo, Zelle, school purchase order or personal check, so please contact me at chris@chemquiz.net if you’re interested in purchasing a site license!

On to the exciting news – LOTS of new features! I’ve been working over the summer to try to squash as many bugs and add as many new features as possible. My focus was on trying to make ChemQuiz.net easier to use while also increasing its usefulness to Chemistry teachers and students, so I hope I’ve accomplished those goals. Here’s what’s new:

New Quizzes!

• NEW Scientific Notation Quiz
  • convert between scientific notation and decimal notation, includes multiple choice questions
• NEW Chemical Equilibrium Quiz
  • write chemical equilibrium expressions, convert between K_c and K_p, and calculate equilibrium constants and chemical quantities

Improvements to the Dashboard:

• teachers can now assign a quiz to multiple classes or students
• teachers can delete multiple student accounts or generate new passwords for multiple students accounts
• teachers can archive multiple quiz results once they’ve been reviewed
• quiz results from 2020-2021 school year have automatically been archived
• added a giant “join link” popup for teachers to show on the screen for easier student enrollment
• Dashboard automatically generates a QR code for each assignment
• cleaned up the overall appearance and improved the interface of the Dashboard
• custom assignment names now show up in CSV result exports

Additions to documentation:

• instructional videos on how to use the Dashboard, including creating student accounts and quiz assignments

Improvements to all quizzes:

• new Presentation mode! (I’m really excited about this!) One question per screen with larger font and immediate correct answer (site license required) – try it out on the Significant Figures Quiz!
• simpler given values for most quizzes to make math problems easier
• better scientification notation handling so students can enter a number like “6.02 x 10^23” instead of “6.02E23”
• fixed formatting on quizzes and results so that they look similar
  improved formatting of “printable” quizzes
• added cute “Generating Quiz” and “Scoring Quiz” animations!
• add placeholder text to some input boxes to make wanted values a little more obvious
• updated the example quizzes on the Sample Chemistry Curriculum page to include new features
• LOTS of other under-the-hood improvements!

Quiz-specific improvements:

• Balancing, Identifying & Predicting Chemical Equations Quiz:
  • added option to filter by reaction types
  • added difficulty levels based on the complexity of the chemical equation
  • added acid-base neutralization reactions
• Molar Conversions Quiz:
  • added two-step molar conversion problems (e.g. grams to moles to particles)
• Naming Compounds & Calculating Molar Masses Quiz:
  • multiple choice questions!
  • new option to choose compounds based on whether they have single or multiple charge ions (e.g., aluminum vs. copper)
  • added extra error message for I’s and L’s to compound naming quiz
  • added alternate formulas for some compounds
• Significant Figures Quiz:
  • added option for multiple choice questions
• Stoichiometry & Limiting Reagents Quiz:
  • added liters as a unit option

I’m also working on several new features and quizzes that I hope to finish soon:

• new Lewis dot structures quiz
• new photon wavelength & frequency quiz
• new reaction rates quiz
• better integration of Dashboard features so that they’re faster and easier to use
• prevent students from resubmitting answers for the same quiz instead of retaking the quiz with new problems
• more quizzes with multiple choice questions
• better quiz result filtering in the Dashboard
• and more!

If you have any suggestions for new quizzes or features, please feel free to drop me a line at any time at chris@chemquiz.net or by filling out the Contact form. Also, please spread the word about the site:

• tell other Chemistry teachers about ChemQuiz.net
• consider following my 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 displays your school name on the About page)

Thanks again for all of your support this past school year, and I look forward to doing what I can to make this upcoming school year a little easier for you and your students. Take care and stay safe!
-Chris

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!