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Perseus overview

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Video transcript

I just want to do a quick overview of our tools for creating questions on Khan Academy and so to create questions you should be logged in as as someone who has permission to create questions and so you know make sure your your Khan Academy account is set up with the appropriate permissions you can let one of us know and we can we can take care of that for you but to get to it you go to / dev admin / content / items and this is the way that you get into it and when you come to this page you will see a couple search boxes that will allow you to search for existing items that have been created or you can click the add an item button to create a brand new item but but it basically just to give you an idea of how you can find items that are in the system all of our items when we create them we should tag them with some sort of tag that indicates what the item is about and if you're working on a particular project with Kahn Academy one of us will let you know what tags you should be using for the items that you create but let's say I want to find some items on calculus maybe i'm working on related rates things so i can search for that particular tag and i will pull up all of the items that have that have that tag associated with them and maybe i'm working on a couple different things so i can actually search for you know multiple tags so maybe I'm also interested in epsilon delta and so it'll pull up the items that have either of those tags so you can search for things that way you can also search for all of the items that are in a particular exercise you know if I'm interested in you know prehistoric art quiz this will have all of the items that are in that in that exercise as well as the other tags i searched for so you can you can kind of search for a bunch of different things depending on what you're looking for so I'll remove this because I'm just interested in calculus right now and so this shows me kind of a preview of all of the items that matched my search and if I want to if I want to edit one of these items then I can click the edit button next to it and that will take me to the item editor and this is a an interface that that you'll become intimately familiar with as you as you create items but i'll just give you a very quick overview of what it looks like so the basic gist of this is on the left hand side you can edit the text and the the answer and in any of the other parameters about the answer as well as the text of the hints and you can you can remove hint so you can add hints and so forth on the left hand side you can also add the tags so when you create an item you want to make sure you put the appropriate tag on it so that you can find it again if you create an item and you forget to tag it then it's it becomes very difficult to find because again really the only way we have to find items easily is to search by by tag so as on the right hand side I get a preview of what the item will look like to a user and so you can see for example here I have this URL of of an image and on the right hand side it gives me a preview of what that image will look like when it's inserted into the question and I also have some text I have within dollar signs this is rendered as la tech math formatting that way i can do fractions if i edit stuff on the left hand side let's say i change this from a two meter tall boy to a very tall three meter tall boy you can see it updates immediately over here if I if I change you know any of this math formatting let's say I want this to be a larger fraction I can just change it and it becomes larger or smaller so as I update things on the left hand side I get an immediate preview on the right hand side which is very handy as you you know particularly if you're if you're just sort of getting a hold of some of the the style and formatting things you can you can immediately see if you're doing it right or not the other thing over here is that is the correct answer you obviously need to specify a correct answer there are a couple different answer types and I'll go into details on these in future videos in this case the answer is an expression and the correct answer is four thirds and so that's that's set there and there's some options that go with that and again I'll go into that in future videos and then below here we have the hints that go along with this question and all of the questions on Khan Academy have or hints that go along with them and the purpose of hints is it is kind of twofold one is if a student is has never seen the content before some students like to learn by by just seeing examples and so they'll go to you know an exercise and they look at a question they'll say I don't really know how to do this and so they look at the hints one by one and they'll try to figure out from the hints you know what's going on or what the steps are the other use case is students who you know they've they maybe have had some instruction in the concept they they give the the question to try they may be you know answer it in you know they're told that they have the wrong answer and so they want to figure out where they went wrong and so in that case they're looking at the hints just to see the problem worked out to see you know maybe what step they they you know they went wrong maybe they forgot a minus sign or you know some it might be something simple like that they just want to see okay that's the mistake I made and they learn from it that way but one thing to keep in mind is you know I guess first you know we generally like the hints to be fairly fairly short and concise but but obviously clear as well we're not trying to we're not trying to you know like I said some students will use hints to kind of try to learn the concept but you know our goal is not to is not to completely and comprehensively teach the concept using the hints we expect that the student is going to have some instruction elsewhere where there's videos or classroom or somewhere and the hints are really just there is a supplemental tool to help them kind of understand you know am I am I using the right approach for this problem so we don't want to we don't want to get like really really into a really detailed explanation in the hints we just want to make sure we cover you know if I were working this problem out here are the steps I would go through and just kind of leave it at that we don't need to talk about like other cases that don't apply to this problem that sort of thing and so the hint should be fairly fairly simple straightforward you were just showing steps we're not explaining you know what we're doing here we're not saying oh we're subtracting 2 s from both sides and so we get you know we particularly in calculus we don't need to that level of detail so this is this is you adequate enough the last thing I'll say about hint says it's very important that the last hint in your in your question have the right answer so the last ten should always should always tell the student what the right answer is and that's because on Khan Academy when a student is presented with a problem the only way for them to move to the next problem is for them to type in the right answer and so there should be some way for them to get that right answer even if they don't really know how to do the problem because they may just be starting out and then it may take them a few problems to to kind of start to understand what they're doing you know or just you know frankly even just to realize that they maybe should go somewhere else and get you know find some other resources but but we we want them to be able to progress to the next problem even if they're completely stuck on this problem and so the way that we do that is make sure that the last team has the correct answer so that you know if they're just completely stuck they don't understand the question they can just take all the hints they can type in that correct answer and move on to the next question and of course as soon as they take hints we mark them wrong so you know you don't have to worry about giving away anything or anything like that our system is our analytics are going to see that you know they didn't understand this because they took hints but we we just like to have that that correct answer is the last him so that's very important that we always have that beyond that there's a couple things up here you know if if you're creating a bunch of items that are similar you can use the duplicate item button and that will create another copy of this item and then you can maybe change the numbers or things like that to create a similar question there's a save item button that if once you make changes you you of course want to make sure you click the Save item button to save it as a content creator you're not going to see this make live button that's something that internally we use so that's that you probably won't see that and then there's a preview and of course you have a preview over here of what the problem looks like but this preview will actually render the problem as the student will see it and so you'll notice if I click this there's a few differences so one is that the hints are not shown immediately because when a student sees the problem the student is not going to see the hints and you also see that the answer is over here and I could try to answer it maybe I think the answer is one-half and that's wrong and you can also see in this case the problem was set to show the student a calculator and so you can see the calculators is available and then if I want to see the hints i can use this button here and you can see the hints reveal one at a time and this is exactly how it would show up to a student so they could take one hint and see okay this is the first step let me see if I can figure it out from there or you know they are completely stuck that can take all the hints and eventually we give them the answer and they can go ahead and type in the answer there if they if they are stuck and then they can move on to the next question so that that shows the preview and it's probably a good idea particularly as you are starting out when you create an item to go ahead and check out that preview just to make sure that the item that you created you know ends up looking to the student the way that you intended it to look so that's I think everything that I wanted to just kind of cover in this in this quick overview video the next video Ben Alpert made a little while ago with an earlier version of Perseus but I think it's still applicable in terms of we haven't added you know changed our features too much where he'll walk through creating a problem and so that that's probably the next video should watch and then I'll make a few more videos going over some of the newer features that we've added