The magic code.

It has been my mission in life over the last couple of weeks to take an interactive game/exercise that, on paper, looks like this

and make an interactive exercise on screen that looks similar. Creating the game itself inside hot potatoes was not terribly difficult but my problem has been the colours. I had experimented in other types of exercise with adding pictures. This achieved the goal but it was time consuming and messy, furthermore, it is impossible to put pictures into the middle of a sentence. So I was left with a set of exercises, some of which were beautifully colour coded (the colours refer to the sub-list of the academic word list the vocab is from) and some which just had a number next to them to denote the sub-list. This irritated my sense of perfection so I set about trying to fix it.

Firstly I learnt that you can write directly into a hot-potato file in html code and it will be recognised. From there it was just a case of finding the right bit of code and applying it to the exercises I had already created.

The magic code can be found here and I can put this into any type of hot potato and it gives me something which looks like this

Pretty similar to the one at the top of the page don't you think?

If you look carefully you will see I changed the text slightly, I was forced to do this to make it fit on the page but other than that.... a resounding success.

Time to put the kettle on I think....