Accuracy settings for text entry (strict / relaxed)

Until now (6th November 2024) SentenceBuilders activities requiring text entry (typing with a keyboard) have always required students to type out the target sentence 100% accurately, matching the target sentence in all aspects, including:

  • Accents
  • Case-sensitivity
  • Punctuation

And that system has worked great for the last 3 years or so.

Except that I have heard on numerous occasions that students can find it frustrating when they are penalised for not typing a capital letter, or for neglecting to type a comma (often arbitrary) into a sentence.

I also considered the text entry requirements for my other web projects (TextActivities, TeachVid, Textivate), where students simply have to type in the missing letters -- punctuation, accents, upper or lower case are not a factor in determining student scores -- and wanted to offer something on SentenceBuilders that brought it more into line with those other sites.

Having consulted users of SentenceBuilders I decided to add the ability for teachers to relax the text entry requirements, should they wish to do so.

STRICT OR RELAXED?

For each of the 3 categories mentioned above, teachers can now decide whether the text entry requirements are strict (the default) or relaxed. See the info below.

Accents
  • Strict = students must type or insert all accents (default)
  • Relaxed = students can ignore accents
Case-sensitivity
  • Strict = students must type the correct case - upper or lower
  • Relaxed = students can type any case
Punctuation
  • Strict = students must type ALL punctuation
  • Relaxed = some punctuation after words [ ,.;:!? ] is not required

CHANGING THE SETTINGS

Resource page

Use the new keyboard button to access the text entry accuracy settings. Once set, these are stored in cookies in your browser.

Both teachers and students have access to these settings, but note that these settings only affect the activities (including circuit activities) on the resource page, not on assignments or competitions.

Setting assignments and competitions

When setting an assignment or a competition, you'll see these options in the final stage.

Note that they are always strict by default (i.e. all red).

You can also change these settings when editing an assignment or competition.

CAVEATS

In both the the resource page image and the class page image (setting assignments) above, you will see that there are a couple of caveats:

  1. these settings do not affect text entry for Chinese or Japanese
  2. these settings do not affect any "SB Context" activities

I hope you find this new feature useful :o)