Open-source Flash quiz maker

Click on the screenshot to check out an example quiz. You'll need the latest Flash player to see it.

Over the past several months, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to devote part of my working hours to learning to use Adobe Flash (CS4). Because I was a complete beginner, I worked through some basic Lynda.com tutorials about Flash and ActionScript 3.0 before striking out on my own. I set the following four goals for my output.

1. Reproduce the functionality of the quiz template that came with older (CS 3) versions of Flash. This template allows you to make drag-and-drop, multiple-choice (single- and multiple-answer), short-answer (text input), and true-or-false questions.
2. Improve upon the pedagogical value of the functionality by allowing more individualized feedback. For example, if the user chose the wrong answer in a multiple choice question, I wanted to be able to give feedback that explained why that answer was wrong. My inspiration for this came from the Hot Potatoes suite.
3. Make the application accessible to instructors. This means that instructors shouldn’t need to know how to use Flash or even own a copy of Adobe Flash to be able to create a quiz and customize its appearance. I achieved this by linking all text, colors, and images to an XML file, which can be edited using any text editor.
4. Make the application open and freely available. This was easy to accomplish thanks to the open-mindedness of my boss, Melissa, who is a fellow supporter of open source. The way she saw the situation, our group (the Distance Course Design & Consulting Group, aka DCDC) is funded by a federal grant – so the work that we produce should be shared with the taxpayers who ultimately fund the grant. (Yes! How true!) The quiz-maker application is published under the BSD, and the accompanying instructions are published under a Creative Commons license (BY/NC/SA).

I was able to accomplish all four of these goals! So, here is the DCDC Flash Quiz Maker as a .zip file. The file includes instructions on how to use it, which I hope are clear. Please comment below on how the application and the instructions could be improved! Or email me, or send me a tweet.

Some caveats:

• I envision this as an application to create teaching/learning tools, rather than assessing knowledge. That is why a range of individualized feedback is possible. This individualized feedback means that answers are not necessarily 100% right or wrong. This fact, combined with controls that allow the user to try a given question an unlimited number of times and freely move back and forth among the questions, means that a final score would be meaningless. So, no score can be recorded or reported to the user or anyone else.
• Bugs are guaranteed! I tested this, of course, and everything seems to work fine for me. But this is my first attempt at programming, and I probably didn’t anticipate what YOU are about to do with it. Please let me know about the problems you run into so that I can fix them. Or even better, send me a new version that includes the fixes and improvements you’ve made. That’s one of the great things about open source, right?