Hot Potatoes

Hot Potatoes is a software suite developed years ago at the University of Victoria. It includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. As of November 2019, it has been updated to adapt to HTML5.

Despite using a simple interface, it is very user-friendly and allows teachers to write their own, customized activities and run them:

  • on a local network
  • on a website
  • on Moodle

When using Hot Potatoes on Moodle, teachers and students can see details about all the attempts and statistical information about the performance of each item.

There are, at least, 8 exercise types that can be created with Hot Potatoes. Depending on the exercise type we want to create, we’ll choose a different potato.

To create selected-response or short answer quizzes, we’ll use Jquiz

An example of a multiple-choice grammar activity.

An example of a true or false reading activity.

An example of a short-answer activity.