Yacapaca

Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching

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  • Introducing Sequence questions

    Being able to work out a sequence is a classic demonstration of understanding and this makes it a popular assessment option.

    The new Sequence question type in Yacapaca supports up to 5 items to be sequenced, with text, images or both. It uses a simple and intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

    sequence

    This sample quiz will give you a flavour of what is possible.  Try it!

  • GCSE Exam Practice modules coming in April

    Exam results

    This April, we are launching a new series of professionally written and edited online practice GCSE exams, entirely auto-marked.

    The aim is to raise GCSE results by at least one grade level for students who practice regularly.

    The first fruit of our labours is J276 OCR Computer Science Practice Exams. Follow the link to see the current state as we complete development.

    Features:

    • All GCSE question types, including multiple choice, short-text and long-text
    • Exam-timed questions
    • Instant, automatic marking
    • Formative feedback
    • Student motivation features
    • Select questions by keyword, topic and difficulty

    There is a huge pile of work to do between now and then. New software modules to be written – some of them using advanced AI. A whole authoring and editing process has to be created and populated with talented individuals. But there is nothing we’ve not done before. What this project does is for the first time pull together skills we have developed over the last 25 years into a single, amazing, product.

    I’m excited!

  • This one small accounting change could save every teacher 8 hours per week

    Here is a fairly typical budget for a smallish 5-teacher department in a mid-sized secondary school:

    There is a third item that is usually accounted separately, cost of cover staff. If the average teacher is off for 1 week per year – whether for illness, external training or other reasons, they are covered by a supply teacher costing the school around £200/day.

    • £200 * 5 teachers * 5 days per year = £5,000/year.

    CYPE-Infographic_E_Wales_cropped

    Cover staff are notoriously (more…)

  • Timed questions help students get in ‘flow’

    It all started one warm Friday afternoon about 12 years ago. I was observing a Y10 class in a fairly typical mainstream secondary school. They were taking a test using Paperless School, a now-defunct system that I had designed.

    One pair of boys particularly caught my attention. They were lolling back in their chairs, chatting about snooker and doing their absolute adolescent damnedest to project a “too cool for school” attitude. Once in a while they would click on an answer on the screen so they could lay some vague claim to still being working.

    Engaged with the task they were not.

    Realisation slowly dawned that, as system designer, this was my fault. I had to take responsibility for (more…)

  • A very short primer on gamification

    Yacapaca is a gamified formative assessment system. I want to discuss briefly what that means, and how we interpret it in software.

    Gamification is the art of making things you want to do anyway more fun, and more motivating. To understand why this is so powerful, I recommend this 12-minute TED talk by Seth Priebatsch because it is a lot more fun and motivating than the (more…)