Alex Little

Last weekend I went up to Cantabria with the caving club to do part of Sistema del Gándara, it’s one of the longest caves in Spain with over 105km of passages, so even though we spent the night camping in the cave (34 hours in total), we still only saw a small section of the whole system. On Tuesday we also visited Cueva Mur. Unfortunately my camera broke whilst in Gándara so I don’t have too many photos, but below are the ones I did manage to get. The photos with the cotton wool looking crystals are a type of Aragonite (so I’ve been told) and in Gándara we also got to see a lot of Gypsum Flowers.

For info I’ve just published the HEAT demo app up on Google Play for anyone who is interested in having a look.

Couple of notes…

• This is a work in progress so not everything may work as expected. Any feedback is welcome.
• To initially log in to the app, you’ll need to create an account on mQuiz. This is because any responses to the self assessment exercises are sent (if you are online) to be stored on mQuiz.
• The embedded videos won’t be available, the videos aren’t included in the app on Google Play, they’re stored separately on the phone SD card (to keep the apk file size down). Please contact me if you’d like details about the videos we’re using.

Now that I’ve been caving in Spain a few times (also went canyoning yesterday in Poyatos, Cuenca), I’ve learned quite a lot of the Spanish caving words, so thought I’d share them here in case these are useful for the presumably small group of English speakers who go caving in Spanish speaking countries.

I’m sure there are lots of useful words missing, so please send on any suggestions/amendments. I’ll also add to this list as I learn more.

abajar – to descend/go down
agua – water
albergue – hostel
anclaje – anchor point
arnés – harness
barrancos – canyoning
boca – hole (entrance to cave)
botas de goma – wellies
caída (caer) – fall (to fall)
casco – helmet
comida – food
croll – chest ascender
cuerda – rope
cueva – cave
escaladar – to climb
escarpinas – neoprene boots
espeleologia – caving
espera – wait
estrecho – narrow
frio – cold
guantes – gloves
libre – free (as in I’m off the rope)
liso – smooth
listo – I’m ready
luz – light (‘frontal’ is also used for headlight)
mojado – wet
mono – oversuit (literally ‘monkey’)
moretón – bruise
murciélago – bat
muro – wall
neoprena – wet suit
nudos – knots
pasamanos – traverse on rope (literally ‘hand rail’?)
pato – Petzl Shunt (literally, pato = duck)
piedras – stones/rocks (also shout this if you drop something!)
pila – battery
plano – flat
polvo – dust/dirt
pozo – pot/hole/well
progresion vertical – single rope technique (SRT)
puño – ascender (literally ‘fist’)
refugio – hut (usually open/free and very basic)
roca – rock
rodillera – knee pad
seco – dry
sima – pothole/cave
subir – to climb/go up
tapas – layer (in the sense of layers if rock, as well as free food with drink)

Here is a brief overview of how I created the Android application with the HEAT content. It is very much a demo/prototype application, so I’m sure there are many other ways this could be done (maybe in a more generic approach).

I used the plain zip download format of the HEAT modules (eg: http://labspace.open.ac.uk/blocks/formats/download_unit.php?id=6612) – which essentially provides a set of static webpages of all the module content. I noticed a couple of issues with these downloads, for example some had incorrect references to images, and the contents page wasn’t in quite the right order, but no big problems.

I then used the PhoneGap framework to turn this content into an Android application, just applying a revised stylesheet and adding a new header/footer for navigation. Initially I tried working with a whole HEAT module, but we found there was just too much text for anyone to be able to read comfortably, so we cut the content down to just the essential parts (introduction, learning outcomes, summary and SAQs). This was the part that probably took the most time, since it was a manual process to refactor the content in this way.

I’m sure there are ways this could be done in a more generic and less-manual way, perhaps using the OU XML to generate only these specific sections, but I suspect that we will always want to edit the content slightly for mobile devices, especially since we’ll be adding videos and perhaps some audio content too. Using the PhoneGap framework means that we should easily be able to transfer this application over to iPad/Blackberry/Windows Mobile applications with very little effort.

For embedding the videos, I used a PhoneGap extension to allow the embedding of local video content. The videos we’re testing out are from the Global Health Media Project, and are stored on the phone/tablet local SD card. We could include the videos directly in the Android apk package, but this is likely to make the apk quite large, plus we’ve not yet finalised which videos we’d like to embed.

The final part to all this is the interactive self assessment exercises. This is using a web app I have been developing over the last few weeks (mQuiz) and is designed to allow quizzes to be run offline. The quiz can be created then stored as a JSON object and a javascript library is then used to display the quiz to the user. If the user has an active internet connection then their responses are sent back to the mQuiz server, if they are working offline their responses are kept until a connection is available.

So we now have an Android application which can be run completely offline, with all the content, videos and quizzes pre-loaded onto the phone.

All of this is a work in progress, the code is up at: https://github.com/alexlittle/HEAT-Training-Android. I’m sure there are areas where improvements to this could be made – any suggestions welcome.

Have just added some new functionality to mQuiz so you are able to embed a quiz on your webpage. Here’s an example:

After you’ve created your quiz, you’ll see the option to get the embed code for putting on your website – I’m thinking about the best place to provide the embed code for all users to see/access (currently only the original quiz author sees the embed code).

To be able to take the embedded quiz users do not need an account on mQuiz, so all results are stored (and listed in the analysis pages) as being from a ‘Guest user’, unless you already happen to be logged into mQuiz. I’m now working out how to allow people to create an account at the end of the quiz to store their results against their own account.

Any feedback/comments appreciated…

[For info: the 'Magnetic Mayhem' quiz above has been taken from OpenLearn: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/science-maths-technology/science/geology/magnetic-mayhem-quiz]

Here’s an updated video showing the OU HEAT content running on an Android smartphone and tablet showing embedded video content (videos stored locally on the device) and interactive self assessment exercises:

The video we’ve embedded is from the Global Health Media Project

Posting from Digital Campus blog:

We’ve recently been looking at how we can embed some of the Open University HEAT training content (for HEWs in Ethiopia) onto mobile phones and have these integrated alongside interactive self assessment questions (SAQs).

We restricted the content to just putting the introduction, learning outcomes, summary and SAQ for each of the study sections, otherwise there is far too much text content for users to comfortably read on screen – so this is designed to supplement (rather than replace) their existing course manuals.

The quizzes can be taken anytime, whether they have an internet (GRPS) connection or not, and results are submitted back to the mQuiz server (or stored for later upload if no connection is currently available). All the content and quizzes are stored directly on the phone. Users need an internet connection to initially log in, but once logged in they won’t need to re-enter their details (unless they log out or change their password).

Their SAQ results are stored on the phone, along with a ranking for how they have performed against others who have taken this assessment exercise.

Here is a quick demo video of this running on my mobile:

The next steps are to test embedding video and audio content.

I’ve just uploaded a new video to demonstrate the changes I’ve been making recently to mQuiz:

In addition to using either your smartphone or standard web browser, I’ve also updated the mQuiz Android client, which can now be found at: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mquiz.

Any feedback welcome.

Looking back at my recent blog postings I realise that most seem to be just holiday/travel photos, so to show I have really been doing some work too, here is some info on the latest updates I’ve been making to mQuiz.

The big change is that now I have an HTML5 version, so you can run the quizzes in your browser (either on your normal PC/laptop or on your smartphone). The quizzes and results are cached, so if you happen to be offline you’re still able to take quizzes. The mobile browser version (at: http://mquiz.org/m) supports all the same functionality as the Android application but will make the app available to more users (even those without smartphones). The browser version has a search feature and will suggest quizzes for you to take.

mQuiz running in Firefox on laptop

mQuiz running in Android emulator

The other change I’ve made is that the detailed list of results for a quiz are only available to the owner/creator of that quiz (previously these were available to anyone), although the overview results (average scores, average score by question) are still available to anyone who is signed in.

I’ll still be maintaining the Android specific app for mQuiz, but will probably spend more time focussing on the HTML5 version for now.

I’m sure there are still some kinks to work out and I have lots of ideas for functionality I’d like to add so will be working on these over the coming weeks. Any feedback welcome if you find something not working correctly. In the meantime test your knowledge of the periodic table.