A few changes were made to the Math Flash Cards recently which included fixing the print option and tweaking the scoring.
After a student completes a set of 10, 25, 50 or 100 questions, they are given the option to print their results including showing them which questions they got correct and incorrect. A few weeks ago, I noticed that the print option was printing the entire flash cards page rather than just the result, so this has now been corrected. A sample print out shows check marks and exes and shows the answer that the student gave.
Previously, the scoring system for the flash cards enabled some users to get massive scores for little effort, so the scores were tweaked to prevent that. One way that you could have gotten a massive score in the past was to select multiplication and division and make the range of the first number 0 to 0 and the second number a huge range. All the answers would result in 0, so someone could blast through in a short amount of time and get rewarded for it. But no longer! Here is a little insight into the new scoring system:
The base score is the percent of correct answers. If a student gets a score of 9 out of 10, they will get 90 as their base score (as 9/10 = 90 percent). There is a multiplier for the number of operations used and a multiplier for the number of questions. That means if a student selects all four operations and does 100 questions (and gets most of them correct), they will get a higher score than someone who selects one operation and 10 questions. There is also a ranges multiplier which is on a logarithmic scale, so increasing the ranges only increases this slightly. Finally, there is a time multiplier which is highly downplayed from the old scoring system and does not multiply your score very much, nor does it reward you for being faster than one question per second. This is probably a good thing since we all know students who take more time than others and they shouldn’t feel badly because their friend got an enormous score for the same effort.
The flash cards page as of today is the 14th most popular page on Math-Drills.com and since it is presumably used by children, there is no advertising on the page. Over 16,000 flash cards sessions were completed so far in November. The only information that is requested is a two character identifier, so students can find their score in the high scores table if they are brilliant enough to get on it. In other words, there is no personally identifiable information requested, collected or stored and all the scores are automatically deleted at the end of each month.
The final change was to change the color scheme of the scores tables. This was purely aesthetic and was done using a base 16 algorithm of my own invention. I hope you like it!
I have a small wish list of other tweaks that I would like to perform on the flash cards page, but that would require a JavaScript guru which I am not. Can you help?
