Sam Archer
Online exam for Year 10 Technology students
Wellington High School
Year 13 ICT, full-year project
Teacher: Vince Brannagan
Sam's was asked by technology teacher Terry Hawkings to create an online examination system for his Year 10 class. In other solutions Terry had looked at, the correct answers were often visible in the source code of the page, meaning craftier students could easily cheat. Terry asked Sam to come up with a solution of an online test within a more secure environment that enabled instantaneous notification of results to both teachers and students, eliminated possible cheating, and avoided the normally large amounts of photocopying required to test a class.
After extensive research, Sam designed his system, the template shell of which is illustrated above. "Page design was not a critical aspect of the project," Sam says. "The only specifications given by the client are that it should be very simple and involve bright, positive colours. Other specifications I made for the project are as follows: made for 1024 x 768 resolution as that is the default on WHS workstations, compatible with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, file sizes do not need to be minimised as it is all on a LAN which provides a very fast and reliable transfer of data.
"I kept my focus on the direct needs of my client, but created the system so it could be used to test anyone for anything. The nature of the coding of my final prototype allows quick and easy change."
Sam's solution was excellent, fulfilling all the requirements of the teacher in an attractive bug-free program that was user-friendly for both teacher and students. As for security, the data is kept on a secure server so the only thing that can be 'stolen' is the HTML coding of the template which the host can view. All the 'working parts' are in the server-side PHP code and SQL database, which students can't access at all.
Sam gave a presentation of his project at a Beacon Practice evening at Parliament to industry professionals, Technology teachers and students and their families hosted by MP Marion Hobbs in October 2006 - see the movie of this presentation.