MANGO-MATCH: A free program for making browser-based vocabulary matching exercises
This is a system offering great flexibility in making computer-based vocabulary matching exercises for language learning. All the necessary components can be downloaded in a zipped folder. The only additional thing you need is to have Adobe AIR installed on your computer: http://get.adobe.com/air/
The exercise method is basically drag-and-drop, but with the added feature that a mistake sets the exercise back to square one (though with rearangement), except for words that have been correctly positioned twice (or any arbitrary number of times) in a row. These words are assumed to have been learned, and are left in their correctly matched positions. The penalty for mistakes is intended to encourage active memorization and discourage complacency about words which have been correctly positioned just by trial and error. You can try out in this live example, in which the required number of correct consecutive placements is 2.
The operation of the authoring program, mango-match, is described below, and The program also allows the exercise appearance (text size and colors, background colors, etc.) to be adjusted easily.
The exercise itself is a Flash movie, the contents and appearance of which are determined by two xml files, vocab.xml and design.xml (one to control each aspect), which the authoring program generates.
When you unzip the downloaded file, you will find a folder named mango-match containing the authoring program installer, mango-match.air, and a folder named uploadFiles which contains the template files the authoring program will use to generate your exercises. Put the entire mango-match folder, or a copy of it, into your documents folder ('MyDocuments' in the case of Windows). You will then need to install the authoring program (first installing Adobe AIR if it is not already on your computer) by double-clicking the .air file. You can move this file anywhere ifyou like, but the mango-match folder and its subfolder uploadFiles must always be left in the documents folder. When you make your exercises, you will find them in the mango-match folder.
Having installed the mango-match application, you will see that there are 2 tabs in the program, data and appearance. Enter pairs of words or phrases in the 2 boxes at the top, and click Add to confirm each pair as a new exercise item.
When you click the Finished! button, the exercise naming box comes up. Enter a name and click Make exercise.
You should get confirmation as below:
You can then find the new exercise, ready for uploading, in a folder (named "example" in this case) inside the mango-match folder. The exercise folders can be uploaded to, e.g., your site's "matching-exercises" directory and be accessed from the URL www.yoursite.com/matching-exercises/exercise1, ...exercise2, ...exercise3, etc. Note that they will not work locally on the computer, except on an internally installed server.
The Appearance tab brings up this interface. Changes you make will be reflected in the Preview panel on the right, except for Temporary and Permanent glow color, which are the colors used to signify items matched correctly which are not yet "fixed" or "fixed", respectively. When you are satisfied with the appearance, click the finished button, and that appearance will become the new default scheme for subsequent exercises. Note that the current design.xml file in the mango-match folder controls the appearance of generated exercises, so you can rename files containing designs you might want to use again, and name them back to reactivate them. Of course you can also upload new design files to change the appearance of already uploaded exercises.
For customization, modify the html file, or replace it completely with your own (in which case the Scripts folder will no longer be needed). You just need to embed the vocab.swf Flash file, and ensure the sound effect files bounce.mp3 and bucp.mp3 are in the same folder. If you want to change the sound effects, replace these files by your own mp3 sound effect files (a silent one if you don't want any sound) of the same name. You can make these changes to an individual exercise once it has been made, or if you make changes to the files in the uploadFiles sub-folder of the mango-match folder - which serves as a template - they will be reflected in the exercises you subsequently make.
The xml files can also be edited in a text editor or xml editor, without using the mango-match program (they are reasonably self-explanatory), but mistakes may render an exercise inoperable. You can include Japanese (or other non-alphabetic languages, I expect) in the vocab.xml file, as the example shows. If you edit the file by hand, an editor which cannot handle utf-8 properly may cause problems.
email for questions, comments, etc.:
Myles O'Brien, Mie Prefectural College of Nursing, Japan.
Download the zip file