Bugs Archives : ChemQuiz.net

Hello fellow Chemistry teachers! I hope you’re all doing well, staying safe, and making time for your own mental health as we all prepare for the most uncertain school year in modern times. Like many of you, I’ve been tasked with figuring out how to teach my science classes to some kids on Tuesday/Thursdays and other kids on Wednesday/Fridays while also teaching kids who are connecting from home, including my own child. It’s a huge mess, so I hope that the practice quizzes on ChemQuiz.net will play a role in helping you meet the needs of your students.

First, I’d like to welcome the new schools that have signed up to use ChemQuiz.net this upcoming school year! We’re up to 31 schools and a private tutor, which span across 16 states and 2 provinces of Canada, which is so cool! I’ve reached out to just about every school district in Ohio that I know is starting with remote learning (I’m keeping a list out of curiosity), but it’s impossible for me to track what’s going on in every state, so please feel free to spread the word. Any school district with a student population that’s greater than 50% “economically disadvantaged” will receive a free site license to the ChemQuiz.net Dashboard, regardless of their pandemic plans, because I want to try to help as many underprivileged kids as possible during this huge mess in our country.

Now, on to the big news: there are three new quizzes available on ChemQuiz.net!

Acid-Base Neutralization Quiz – with strong and weak acids and bases, suggested by my colleague Chris Knopick at Roosevelt High School
Density Calculations Quiz – includes the densities of 159 different materials
Percent Error & Percent Yield Quiz – with word problems that use chemical reactions to make them more realistic and challenging

I also added some simple organic compounds to the Mass Ratios & Percent Composition Quiz just for fun. 🙂 I’ve thought about writing a quiz for naming organic compounds, but that gets so complicated so quickly that it makes my head hurt just considering it! I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to teach any organic remotely this year.

A few of you have made great suggestions to me for new quizzes to write, and I’ve added them to the list. I’m an amateur programmer during my best moments, so I have to think about things for a while before they click in my head. I’m going to try my best to get to your requests soon!

Also, I’ve also fixed a few bugs thanks to several of you reaching out to me about issues you were having, including a real stinker involving student quiz results. I can’t thank you enough for pointing out when things don’t work properly! Please keep the bug reports coming.

Finally, I’d like to start listing schools who are using ChemQuiz.net publicly on the website, but I won’t list your school without your permission. If you’re okay with having your school listed, please take a moment to check the opt-in box in your User Info in the Dashboard and click “Update your info”. Totally optional! Once a few schools have opted in, I’ll list them on the About ChemQuiz.net page. Your school name won’t ever be used for anything else besides that list on that one page.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have any problems using the site or suggestions for new quizzes or improvements. You can always contact me at chris@chemquiz.net or by filling out the Contact form. Thanks again for being a part of this grand experiment, and good luck this school year!

-Chris

Hello again, and thanks for signing up for the ChemQuiz.net newsletter! I really appreciate your support as I start up my website of chemistry practice quizzes. I plan on sending this newsletter out once a week, and it’s intended to be informative, so for any reason if you don’t want to receive it, just send me a quick reply with “Unsubscribe” and you won’t get it again. Also, I have a particular distaste for marketing emails, so I won’t share your email address with anyone for any reason.

A lot has happened in the last month, and like many of you, I’m not sure what our school district is planning to do this Fall. To keep my mind off of it, I’ve been writing new chemistry practice quizzes! Since mid-June, I’ve added the following quizzes:

Concentrations of Solutions (with dilutions)
Electron Configuration
Mass Ratios & Percent Composition
Nuclear Reactions (with word problems!)
Significant Figures (with arithmetic and scientific notation)
Solubility

Plus, I’ve added some new features to existing quizzes by request:

Naming Chemical Compounds – added the ability to select between simple (binary) ionic compounds and those with polyatomic ions
Balancing, Identifying & Predicting Chemical Equations – added predicting chemical reactions

I’ve also cleaned up the quizzes so that they largely look the same and have similar features, like being able to generate a printable worksheet in each quiz. If you have any suggestions for improving existing quizzes or making new ones, I’d love to hear them!

There have been some changes to the Dashboard to make it easier for you to assign quizzes to your students. One feature is the ability for your students to join ChemQuiz.net with a simple registration code. You can also have them join a specific class directly. Each school and class has its own six-character registration code, which you can see in the Dashboard under the School Info and Classes pages, respectively. Simply have students go to chemquiz.net/reg, fill out the form, and enter the registration code. This should create their account and add them to your school or class depending on what code they entered.

Another feature that I think will be particularly helpful is the shortlink. When you create an assignment, ChemQuiz.net notifies students through email, but we all know that teenagers never check their email accounts (my own kid included!). In the Dashboard’s Assignments page, you’ll see a table listing all of the assignments you’ve created. Below each quiz name is the shortlink to the quiz, like this:

shortlink: chemquiz.net/ksp

You can send this shortlink out via whatever student messaging system or LMS you use (Remind, Google Classroom, text, etc.). When the student loads the shortlink, if they’re still logged in to ChemQuiz.net, it will give them the option of completing your assignment without having to go the Dashboard first, so this should make it easier to disseminate your quiz assignments.

Additionally, I’ve created lots of Documentation pages with steps on how to do everything on ChemQuiz.net. I’ve also created a Sample Curriculum page with over 50 preconfigured quiz assignments that teachers can copy, modify and use simply by clicking a button!

Finally, I just wanted to thank you again for giving ChemQuiz.net a try! It’s my attempt to help other science teachers out in what is going to be a memorably difficult school year for all of us. I’m sure there will be bugs on the site, so I appreciate your bug reports and patience as I track them down and stamp them out while also teaching my own classes (whatever that ends up looking like!). Take care, keep in touch and stay safe!

-Chris