Chalkface Blog

The best teaching materials in the most practical format.

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  • 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…)

  • How the Analytics pages fit together

    Yacapaca has a dozen different analytics views, depending on exactly what you count as “analytics”. The table below shows the structure.
    Time progression
    		 Block of time Single assignment
    Individual student
    5. Evidence
    6. Parent reports
    Gradebook averages*
    		 Gradebook*
    Activity log*
    Detail*
    Student Set
    7. Progress chart
    8. Progression with metadata
    4. Progress in topics
    2. Quiz analysis
    1. Gap Analysis
    2. Quiz analysis
    3. Analysis whiteboard

    9. Pivot Chart (beta) does not quite fit in this table.

    *strictly speaking these are (more…)

  • How the results pages fit together

    There are three major, and several minor, results pages in Yacapaca. Ordered by level of detail, the major pages are the Gradebook, Activity Log and Detail.

    Gradebook

    Gradebook enhanced
    Click for full size

    This is your overview for a complete student set, for a whole (more…)

  • CAT: Computer Adaptive Testing

    Computer-adaptive Testing (CAT) has actually been around since the 1970s but it is still little-known and less understood.

    How CAT works

    Any given CAT assessment is based on a large bank of questions of varying, but known, difficulty on a given topic. The first question is served at (more…)