MANGO-MULTI: A free program for making browser-based multiple-choice exercises with optional image and sound
This is a system offering great flexibility in making computer-based multiple-choice 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 operation of the authoring program, mango-multi, is described below, and you can try out the resulting exercise using this live example:
Clicking Start/Next should bring up a Play/Pause/Go control, an image, and a question in the box, and a choice of 4 answers on the right. Click one of the answers, and if it is correct, its box will turn green; if not, the box will turn grey and the box of the correct answer will turn green. The small circle in the middle of the vertical green/red bar on the right will also move up or down depending on whether the choice was correct. How far it moves depends on the total number of questions in the exercise. In this example there are only 2 questions, so it will move 1/2 of the distance to the end of the bar.Clicking Start/Next again will bring up the next question.
The exercise itself is a Flash movie, the contents and appearance of which are determined by the xml file, multi.xml , which the authoring program generates.
When you unzip the downloaded file, you will find a folder named mango-multi containing the authoring program installer, mango-multi.air, and a folder named uploadFiles which contains the template files the authoring program will use to generate your exercises. Put the entire mango-multi 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-multi 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-multi folder.
The authoring program interface has three boxes, each of which is a placeholder for a text, sound, or image. The text which will appear as the question or hint can be entered into any of the boxes by typing directly, pasting, or dragging. An mp3 sound or JPG, PNG, or GIF image can be inserted into another box by dragging a file from any location into the box, or just by entering the file name in the same way as text. The third box functions similarly. Images dragged in are previewed as thumbnails and sounds generate a Play button for testing. To generate a question it is only necessary to have at least one item of any type in one box. Six other boxes accommodate the correct answer and up to five distractors. Any number of questions may be added to an exercise. Each question will appear in the browser with the text, sound, and image items in the vertical order as entered at this stage.
The example looked like this in the making. This is the first question at the stage where all the necessary information has been entered. Clicking the ADD current item button will add it, and blank out the entered items to prepare for entry of the next question.
When you click the Finished! button, the exercise naming box comes up. Enter a name and click Make exercise. Note that the exercise background color and the dimensions and font size of the answer boxes are freely adjustable (to handle, e.g., extra long choices), and may be altered any time before clicking the Make exercise button.
You should get confirmation as below.
You can then find the new exercise in a folder (named "example" in this case) inside the mango-multi folder. It is ready for uploading, provided that any image or mp3 files needed have been specified by dragging them to the boxes; any files which have been added just by putting their names into the boxes will not be automatically copied to the exercise folder, and must be copied there manually (this is because the filename alone does not specify where the file is located on your computer). The exercise folders can be uploaded to, e.g., your site's "multi-exercises" directory and be accessed from the URL www.yoursite.com/gap-exercises/exercise1, ...exercise2, ...exercise3, etc. Note that they will not work locally on the computer, except on an internally installed server.
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 multi.swf Flash file.
The multi.xml file can also be edited in a text editor or xml editor, without using the mango-multi program (it is reasonably self-explanatory), but mistakes may render an exercise inoperable. You can include Japanese (or other non-alphabetic languages, I expect) in the multi.xml file. 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