Hot Potatoes: What Is It?

Hot Potatoes is a quiz creator software that allows you to make six different types of exercises. You can create interactive multiple-choice, short answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering, and gap-fill exercises that can be given to students. Hot Potatoes consists of six individual programs: JCloze, JQuiz, JCross, JMatch, JMix, and The Masher.

1. JCloze

JCloze is the Hot Potatoes program in which you can create gap-fil exercises. This program is suitable for vocabulary and text comprehension training. But you can modify it to other exercises, like for listening training. 

2. JQuiz

JQuiz is the most common program used. It used to create question-based quizzes. You can create multiple-choice questions, short-answer questions, hybrid questions, and multi questions. Moreover, you can add reading texts or pictures to it.

3. JCross

JCross allows you to make crossword puzzles. Students will be given a keyword or link to complete the puzzle correctly. To create the crossword, you need to enter some clue, like translation, definition, synonym, antonym, or description for each grid. This program can help the students to build their vocabulary.

4. JMatch

JMatch allows you to create extensive matching exercises including drag and drop types. Students are expected to match items in one list to another list so that a correct list is established. The items can be words or even pictures.

5. JMix

JMix is used to create jumbled-sentence exercises. This program is very useful in creating sentence-making language activities. Moreover, this program provides two formats for the web exported: standard format and drag/drop format.

6. The Masher

Masher is not a program to make exercise, but it used to mix related exercises around a topic so that the part can be linked together in a single index page. The index page then can be uploaded to Hotpotatoes.net or any other online hosting space.

The exercises created with this software can be applied in a lesson in the classroom. For example, you can use exercises to evaluate your students' understanding of report text, as I've made.

You can download the lesson plan here.

You can download the exercises here.