I found this blog post by Joe Dale on a method for creating mobile phone quizzes very interesting. The maker of the videos, Lilian Soon, has since blogged about it herself here. I finally got round to giving it a try for myself today.
I had previously asked members of my Higher class to tell me the make and model of their mobile phone. I checked these on the manufacturer web sites to get information on screen resolution and was surprised to discover that 240 pixels wide by 320 pixels high appears to be something of an industry standard.
I used a simple graphics package to create a series of white rectangles 240 pixels wide by 320 high and pasted in images I had scanned from an old Higher Physics past paper. I used the graphics threshold levels to remove any residual greyness from the scans before inserting the text of each question around them. Simple questions required two images each (one for the question and a second for the answer) while longer questions with multiple statements or diagrams required three or even four image files to complete.
I created seven multiple choice questions over a double period, creating text only questions would be much quicker than tweaking graphics. I uploaded the image files to my phone in jpg format. The results were encouraging, with both the text and images displayed clearly. My only concern was that the order of the files had reversed when transferred to the phone by bluetooth. On trying again, it seems that the problem is that the Apple iSync application transfers multiple files starting with the highest file name, while the phone stores files in the order of receipt. This is an issue requiring a workaround before distributing quizzes to a class.
Here is a question from the set I made. I’ve left them at full size (240 x 320 pixels)
