The Hot Potatoes suite is a set of six authoring tools which enable you to create interactive Web-based exercises of six basic types. The exercises use JavaScript for interactivity, and will work in Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer versions 3 and above on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. The authoring tools will also handle accented characters, so you can create exercises in any language based on the Roman character set, including French, German, and many other European languages.
Although the exercises are constructed using JavaScript, you don't need to know anything about JavaScript to use the tools. All you need to do is to enter your data -- texts, questions, answers etc. -- and the programs will create the Web pages for you. Then you can post them on your Web site. However, the programs are designed so that almost every aspect of the pages can be customized, so if you do know HTML or JavaScript, you can make almost any change you want to the way the exercises work or to the format of the Web pages.
The Hot Potatoes suite is offered as freeware (for non-commercial educational applications) by Half-Baked Software and the University of Victoria CALL Laboratory Research and Development team. However, we do ask that you register the programs; it costs you nothing but an e-mail message, and it helps us to stay in touch with our users and get some idea of who is using our programs. See the help file for more information on how to register. If you wish to use the applications in a corporate or commercial context, please contact us for information on licensing.
Now go on to look at some examples of the kinds of exercises you can make using Hot Potatoes. (Note that the data files for all of these exercises are available in the tutorial folder if you want to look at them inside the authoring programs later.)
