reviseOmatic V2: Electronics

Changes

Over the Christmas break 2009/2010, during record breaking storms and floods in Andalucia, Spain, reviseOmatic got a major overhaul. This has fixed several bugs and no doubt added some new ones. As ever, please mail Neil with bug reports, problems and feedback.

• Every question now has the "Give me the answer" feature. If used, students score zero for that question.
• Selecting a new topic is easier. The topics are now listed once. Topics due for completion are colour coded yellow.
• To manage a class, the teacher must be enrolled in that class.
• When a teacher creates a new class, they are enrolled automatically. Don't delete this enrolment.
• The teachers' class management tools have been simplified. All the tools act on the currently selected class.
• To manage a different class, please use the Switch class link.
• Some page layouts have been changed to make slightly better use of the screen area.
• Students can no longer see each other's grade books. They can only see their own.
• Students are now sorted, ignoring upper / lower case.
• Teachers are listed after the students. Administrators get listed before the students.
• Teachers can reset forgotten student passwords.
• "Help" can now be turned on and off so reviseOmatic can be used in whole "Class Test" mode.
• It is possible to delete all answers for a topic for a whole class. This feature is used to give a "clean slate" before using reviseOmatic for a whole "Class Test".

reviseOmatic

• has over 400 AS test and revision questions for AQA Electronics.
• has over 400 A2 test and revision questions for AQA Electronics.
• logs what students have got right or wrong.
• colour codes correct answers in green and wrong answers in red.
• colour codes less than perfect scores red too.
• has help links to on-line help or support pages for most questions
• has help links that can be turned off if students are using the tool under test conditions
• red or white rows indicate a difficult topic, a poorly designed test question or even poor teaching
• red or white columns indicate a struggling student
• blank columns or many red exclamation marks indicate no work done (for whatever reason)
• scores answers with a small bar chart graphic as described here ...

Any one can Sign Up

• All you need to do is fill in the registration form and verify your email address.
• Teachers can create classes and enrol students who have signed up.
• If the sign-up goes wrong, please send Neil an email. He can complete your sign-up for you. Use the link at the end of this page.

Wish List for Future Improvements

• Alter reviseOmatic to scale up better for larger numbers of users and also for subject areas outside Electronics
• increase the range of question types and provide compatibility with products like Moodle and Hot Potatoes
• make the question editing tool easier to use. Some types of question require a knowledge of PHP programming.

UK AQA Electronics A Level

• Do you teach the UK AQA Electronics A Level?
  Please encourage your students to sign up.

Bugs

• From time to time, reviseOmatic forgets something and tries to credit user zero with knowledge.
  There is no user zero. When this happens, a message pops up.
  If you get this message repeatedly, log out and log back in. That normally fixes the problem.
• Help links don't always point to the most helpful page. Fixing this is a major task and will progress slowly.
• Fixed: A persistent bug that caused an extra record to be created, altered or deleted has been fixed. This bug mainly affected site administration tasks.
• Fixed: The database gridlock problem. There were 30 second lock-ups. This problem has been solved in V2 by using INNODB instead of ISAM tables. Record locking is used instead of table locking.
• Fixed: Correct answers are sometimes marked wrong. This bug has been fixed or greatly reduced.
  It may have been caused by the MySQL cache failing to clear quickly after becoming invalid.
• Suggestions.
  Please mail Neil, using the link below, with suggestions and corrections to improve reviseOmatic.

Abuse

There have been very few problems. Mostly it's students giving themselves idiotic or offensive names. Only one email address has been banned for repeated attacks exploiting common coding weaknesses in on-line databases. It would have been more constructive to mail me about the coding errors instead of exploiting them. Any fool can break something. It takes brains and effort to create something new.

• When you sign up, you have to verify your email address.
• If you abuse reviseOmatic in any way, your email address can be added to a "banned" list.
• Abuse is defined as - using reviseOmatic for any purpose other than learning Electronics.
• If you notice any abuse please mail Neil at the link below.

reviseOmatic V2:    © Copyright - Bug and Abuse Reports - Privacy Statement - Contact Information - Legal Disclaimers