Comments on: Idea I’ll Never Follow Up On, Though It Is Good

By: Brainstorming Ideas for 2010/2011 « Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere

Sun, 16 May 2010 20:39:19 +0000

[...] Idea I'll Never Follow Up On… [...]

By: Mr. Sweeney

Mr. Sweeney — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:27:48 +0000

With your own web space you could make your own page named with randomly generated characters that contained a YouTube imbed. That would probably even make creating the worksheet faster. Take a premade worksheet, write the answer correctly, replace random letters in the begining, swap the letters in the answer, use that to determine your URL. 5 minutes and done? (with no slight chance of an OopsTube!)

By: Mr. H

Mr. H — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:51:08 +0000

I love the idea but, like Sarah said, you do lose the self-checking power of the worksheet. If you’re at a school where technology and access is ubiquitous, it might work.

You may have good intentions, but if somehow the URL resolves to an inappropriate video, it could be bad. I don’t know enough about hashing algorithms or how those short strings are generated to make an educated guess about the probability of that happening. Proceed with caution.

By: samjshah

samjshah — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:26:07 +0000

The solution to the puzzle gives you a series of 11 characters — and these characters lead you to a video. So the solution to problem 1 is 2, and at the bottom the character associated with 2 is P. So that’s the first of 11 characters. When students solve the puzzle, they get to enter it into the url at the top: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P...

That will bring them to a video, if they did it right. I tried changing a character or two, and it didn’t end up working, so in a way, if a student gets it ALL right, they are self checked. But if they mess up once, they won’t get it right. It isn’t self-checking individual problems, but it does have a nice payoff.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:05:22 +0000

Another idea liker if not adopter. My concern with short urls is that you lose some of the self-checking power of the worksheet. Then I tried putting B in the correct URL to see if I was redirected to another, less cool, video. I wasn’t so maybe it works better than I think.

By: David Cox

David Cox — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:44:01 +0000

I like the idea, but how does Vimeo or YouTube fit into this? Last year I started to develop an alternate reality game that had kids do a series of tasks to unlock the clues. Didn’t quite finish it though. Grand ambitions…you’re right there.