Fill in the blank with times (eg 7:30) reads as a "tip" and won't show correct answer

Submitted by [email protected] on Fri, 10/30/2020 - 20:01
Forums: 
Bugs in content types
  • Using H5P through Moodle;
  • using 'course presentation' with a fill in the blank with prepositional phrases of time (eg in the morning, on my birthday) to help ESL students to hear prepostions;
  • Link is here: https://www.floatingcrowbar.com/Moodle/mod/hvp/view.php?id=243&forceview=1 (see slide 4)
  • the 'tip' icon shows;
  • the correct answer is 'at 7:30'  
  • but when checked it shows as incorrect,
  • with the correct answer showing as 'at 7' How do I fix this? 
Content types: 
Course Presentation
papi Jo's picture

papi Jo

Mon, 11/02/2020 - 12:19

Hi [email protected],

What you report is not a bug but a feature of the FITB activity. Unfortunately the original author of that H5P activity had not anticipated that the "special characters" used to achieve different purposes might be needed inside the missing words or phrases themselves, namely: asterisk *, the slash / and the colon :

This problem has been reported a few times on this forum, e.g. the slash problem here: https://h5p.org/node/49404

It is unlikely that this problem will be fixed any time soon, but a much better and more powerful FITB activity has been made avaible here: Advanced fill the blanks. Unfortunately (again) this Advanced fill in the blanks activity is not available in the Course Presentation activity, which does not solve your current problem.

As a workaround you might opt for a different marker to separate hours from minutes, e.g. the letter "h", the full stop, etc. But this depends on the usage of your language & country.

Hope that helps (a little).

 

otacke's picture

otacke

Mon, 11/02/2020 - 15:25

Hi!

"It is unlikely that this problem will be fixed any time soon"

Don't challenge me :-D Shouldn't be that difficult to use a backslash as an escape character ;-)

Cheers,
Oliver

papi Jo's picture

papi Jo

Mon, 11/02/2020 - 16:05

Hi Oliver!

Didn't want to challenge you. I'm pretty sure you can do it, elegantly and swiftly and come up with a pull request to solve this nagging issue. I'm more doubtful about the promptness of the H5P core team to merge pull requests, on account of lack of time and man-power. Let's hope that the situation at H5P HQ will improve and enable them to fix long-standing bugs and feature requests, many of which are your own work.

Cheers,

Joseph

otacke's picture

otacke

Mon, 11/02/2020 - 18:48

Fair assessment.

serettig's picture

serettig

Mon, 11/02/2020 - 16:51

It's certainly really easy to do it, but I fear that a PR won't be accepted because it would change the behaviour of existing content that has used backslashes for some obscure reason (e.g. The Windows path at which you can find dlls is *c:\windows\system32*.). If you do it, it might be a good idea to add an option that enables escape characters to avoid breaking backwards compatibility.

otacke's picture

otacke

Mon, 11/02/2020 - 18:54

Hi Sebastian!

I know. That's why H5P content types can have the upgrades.js file to transform existing contents to new structures, update the params (e.g. by escaping a backslash), and sometimes even introduce extra variables to be able to distinguish between legacy and current versions as e.g. Image Hotspots did.

Best,
Oliver