Archimedes is a web application that permits a set of admins to create exams on web design topics, as well as grade and administer them to classes of students. Exams may consist of a variety of types of questions (short answer, multiple choice, code). The interface also allows for administrators to grade the exams and leave comments for the students to read.- medium
- PHP / MySQL
- completed
- Summer 2009
Archimedes was programmed for use in The Internet Classroom (2009), as I was decided to build a digital test-administering solution for the course I would be teaching in the summer. I was interested in solving particular problems when it comes to testing web design material, such as allowing students to "check" their markup before submission. The entire project was done in less than two weeks, mostly as a "could I do this" sort of project, as I had very little prior experience with PHP.
The "selling point", if you will, of Archimedes is in the development of the "code" question, which allows students to write markup and then click a link to view what it would look like live if they had undergone the process of uploading to an FTP server and then viewed the page in a browser. I felt that this was a better method for testing students, as real world web designers should be constantly checking their markup/CSS as they design, rather than writing a bunch of code and then checking at the end.