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03MIC96.TXT
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2006-10-19
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MICROPENDIUM MICROREVIEWS for March 1996
by Charles Good
LOAD MASTER by Mickey Cendrowski
This is designed for the owner of a minimal expanded disk system
with one or two floppy drives as an aid in loading disk software. It
is written in extended basic with assembly language subroutines and is
the first software I have seen that utilizes John Bull's XB Windows.
Using Bull's product, Load Master displays drop down windows at
appropriate times.
As you use Load Master you are in 40 column mode and are often
presented with several choices. Press the first letter of the choice
you select. When you boot Load Master as XB DSK1.LOAD you are given
your choice of Load manager, Funnelweb, Boot, or Exit. You must add
Funnelweb or John Johnson's Boot to the Load Master disk to make these
choices operative. Pressing "L" for Load manager gets you to the guts
of Load Master.
Here you have your choice of Catalog, Options, Back, or Exit. If
you press "O" for Options a little window appears and gives you these
options; Colors, Drives, Printer, and Back. Colors changes the screen
colors. Drives lets you specify the drive that is accessed with the
Catalog option. You have to go through the Options window each time
you want to change this drive. Path names are supported. Printer
lets you change the name of your printer, and you can supply a path
name if you want to save output to a file. Once your options are
configured you have to press "B" to get Back to the Load manager menu.
Catalog is by far the most significant part of Load Master.
Pressing "C" displays a screen full of file names from the drive
specified with the Options menu. A cursor is positioned next to the
first file name, and you also get a choice of Page?, Label, or Back.
Page? asks for a number and displays that page (screen full) of file
names if there are too many to fit onto one screen. Label prints
nicely formatted disk labels using superscript sized print in a format
that fits fan fold sheets of 1x3 inch sticky labels. If there are too
many file names to fit on one label, Label will automatically space
down to the next label on the fanfold sheet and continue printing file
names.
From a Catalog display you can put the cursor next to a file name
and press <enter>. If the file is DV80 or DF80 the text is displayed
on screen. You press a key to advanced to the next line of text. I
like this method of displaying text. Some DV80 viewers just scroll
the text continuously until you pause the scroll, and the scrolling is
almost always too fast to read. If the program next to the cursor is
an XB program it will run if you press <enter>. If the file next to
the cursor is anything else, pressing <enter> gets you an error
message.
Load Master is a product under development. What I have
described above is v1.2, and the documentation states quite clearly
that this version is less than finished. The stated goal is to allow
the user to load and run any type of runable file by placing the
cursor next to the file and pressing <enter>. This can now be done
using Funnelweb's disk review. Another goal stated in the Load Master
docs is to inform the user of the software needed to load any file
that cannot be run by itself, such as identifying a TI Artist picture
file as such. The author requests user input concerning what users
want future versions of Load Manager to be able to do, and programmer
input on ways to accomplish her stated goals.
Send me $1 and I will mail you the latest version of Load Master
on a SSSD disk. It is fairware, and the author requests that you send
whatever you think the software is worth.
--------------------
QUIZ FAMILY by Charles Kirkwood Jr.
This is a group of separate but related extended basic programs
to help teachers create multiple choice and true/false examinations
You type in data banks of your own test questions and the software
creates nicely exams with a specific number of questions from these
data banks. You can either manually select particular questions from
one or more data banks, or the software will randomly pick the
specified number of exam questions for you.
As a university professor I am familiar with this type of
software and have used several packages similar to Quiz Family. There
are at least two similar products for the 99/4A. One was created by
Jim Peterson, and one was published years ago on Home Computer
Magazine. There are many similar programs in the PC world. Almost
any textbook publisher of high school or introductory level college
textbooks will supply such software free to teachers, complete with
already created test question banks keyed to particular text books.
In my opinion almost all of these 99/4A and PC testmaking software
packages are difficult to use. Editing existing questions in a test
bank is cumbersome, and you almost always need a hard copy printout or
bound hard copy of the test bank questions in order to create an exam.
With the PC software I have seen, if you lose the book containing the
exam questions in the data banks you are out of luck. Your only other
option is to view on screen the data bank questions one at a time and
select or not select that question for your exam. This is very very
cumbersome. You can't check them in big bunches because the software
only displays the questions one at a time.
Based on my experience with similar products I consider Quiz
Family to be as good as any and better than most, which means I rate
it quite highly. This is because of the ability to use any DV80 text
editor such as the Funnelweb editor to enter, edit, and quickly view
exam questions in a data base. The other quiz making programs I have
tried don't give you this ease and flexability. Alternatively, you
can create your quizes using an included extended basic program called
BuildQuiz. This uses several lines in xbasic's 28 column screen
display to simulate a single 80 column text line. This is workable,
but the results are visually kind of confusing. There is no word
wrap.
Whether using a DV80 text editor or BuildQuiz, you have to
preface each 80 column text line (record) with an upper case code
letter to let the software know what to do with the line of text. The
first text line of a question starts with a "Q". Each subsequent line
of the same question starts with a "C". The first answer line must
contain the correct answer and start with "A". For a true/false
question, the first and only answer line might read "ATrue".
Subsequent answer lines, such as in a multiple choice question, start
with "C". The question/answer group ends in a line containing only
"E" (for "End") in the first column of the line.
I had no trouble modifying my existing DV80 files of multiple
choice questions to this format. I just inserted the appropriate
upper case letter at the beginning of each line of the DV80 file.
Since these are DV80 files, they are very easy to go into and edit
questions, add questions, or delete questions. DV80 question files
are than run through a supplied program called Convert to make them
into the Internal/Fixed 80 format needed by Quiz Family to generate
quizes. These exam question data files can also be directly
manipulated (edit add or delete questions) with a program called
Correct if you don't mind the 28 column screen.
PrintQuiz is the real guts of the Quiz Family software package.
This program actually creates and prints your exams from the question
data bases. Questions are printed in random order, and the possible
answers to multiple choice questions are also printed in random order
even though you always entered the correct answer first. You tell
PrintQuiz how many questions to put in the exam. You then tell
PrintQuiz which exact questions to include or you let PrintQuiz
automatically randomly select questions from the data base. The exam
can have any combination of personally selected and/or automatically
randomly selected questions, a feature not found in other quiz making
software I have used. You can tell PrintQuiz to generate several
different versions of the same quiz each containing the same questions
but in a different random order, discouraging students sitting next to
each other from paying attention to their neighbor's answers. A
record of the quiz, listing which questions in the data bank are used
in the quiz and the correct question answers, can be saved to disk.
A couple of additional utilities are included in this very
complete package. A program called MergeQuiz lets you combine several
data banks into one larger bank. The program Select lets you make an
exam file using questions from several different database files. You
can you get a hard copy of a question data bank, complete with correct
answers indicated, using ListQuiz.
If you are a teacher who has access to a textbook publisher's IBM
compatible test bank of questions for a particular text book, you can
convert these questions to a DV80 file on a TI disk for use with Quiz
Family. Using an IBM compatible computer print the entire question
test bank to an ASCII disk file on a 360K IBM disk. Almost all IBM
quiz making software will let you do this. Then on your 99/4A or
Geneve with a DSDD disk controller use the commercial product PC
Transfer to convert this list of questions to a DV80 file on a TI
disk. This is what I have done over the last several years. For the
college courses I teach, all my exams are created with the Funnelweb
editor using questions I write myself or questions that have imported
from publisher's IBM compatible test banks.
Quiz Family is public domain. The author doesn't request any
money for his work. Send me $1 and I will mail it to you on a SSSD
disk.
---------------------
ACCESS:
Mickey Cendrowski (LoadMaster author): 100 Pine St. Russellton
PA 15076
Charles Kirkwood Jr. (QuizFamily author): P.O. Box 1241, Clemson
SC 29633
Charles Good (your humble columnist): P.O. Box 647, Venedocia OH
45894. Phone 419-667-3131. Email cgood@osulima1.lima.ohio-state.edu
(preferred) or good.6@osu.edu