Introduction

The Hot Potatoes Network is a web hosting service for education and training materials. It can be used to host exercises and learning materials created using authoring programs such as WebRhubarb and WebSequitur.

Beyond providing a simple web hosting service for these materials, hotpotatoes.net also stores the results of exercises which students complete, and allows teachers to see and analyse these results online. To make this possible, a teacher can enter a private Administration area, where s/he can create "accounts" for students, giving each one a login name and password.

When students log in to hotpotatoes.net using their password, they can see a list of the exercises provided by their teacher. By clicking on an exercise title, they can download the exercise, and complete it. When the exercise is complete, hotpotatoes.net stores the results, including the student's name, the time taken to complete the exercise, and the student's final mark. The teacher can look at their students' results via the Administration area, and download spreadsheet files of the marks for a particular student or class.

hotpotatoes.net is provided by Creative Technology, in association with Half-Baked Software and the University of Victoria.

Supported Authoring Programs

At present, the service supports exercises produced using two authoring programs: WebRhubarb and WebSequitur. These programs are written by Martin Holmes, and published by Creative Technology. For more information, please see http://www.cict.co.uk/textoys.

Future Developments

We are currently working on adding the Hot Potatoes and Quandary authoring programs to our system: for more information about these programs, please see http://www.halfbakedsoftware.com.

If you have another authoring program which you would like to use in conjunction with our hosting system, please contact us.