The Hot Potatoes suite is a set of six authoring tools, created by the Research and Development team at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre. They 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 4 and above on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. Two of the tools, JMatch and JMix, can also produce DHTML-based drag-and-drop exercises, but these will only work with more recent browsers. 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 languages.

Although the exercises are constructed using JavaScript, you don't need to know anything about JavaScript to use the programs. 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.

If you work in a non-profit-making educational institution or context, and you are prepared to share your exercises by placing them on a publicly-accessible Web server, then you may use the Hot Potatoes suite free of charge. If you are working for a company or in a commercial context, or if you password-protect your exercises or distribute them only on an intranet, you will need to buy a licence (contact Half-Baked Software for information). However, whether you're commercial or otherwise, we do ask that you register the programs; all you have to do is to fill in a form on our Website, 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 registration.

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.)