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There may be several reasons why you might want to create an exercise. As a language student, you may need some tailor-made exercises in specific grammatical questions. As a teacher you may need to create exercises for your students as part of your teaching material, or you may want to upload questions to the teaching portal Moodle as test or exam questions.
As we have seen earlier, what is called an exercise here is actually a description of how 3ET should generate questions. An exercise specifies:
In the following example, we shall create a new exercise. The procedure given here can also be used if you want to modify an existing exercise through the File > Edit exercise menu item.
We shall create an exercise in the conjugation of Hebrew verbs in the qal perfect forms. We shall ask the user to identify the person, gender and number of the perfect forms of various qal verbs.
Select the menu item File > New exercise. A sub-menu will appear showing the databases that are installed on the computer:
In the computer in this example, we can choose between two variants of a Hebrew version of Genesis 1-3 and a Greek version of the New Testament.
The two Hebrew versions are given as “simple” and “advanced”. The difference is that the simple version has fewer options than the advanced one; the simple version is therefore a little easier to use for the novice. Specifically, the simple version can only search for sentence units that are words whereas the advanced version can search for phrases, clauses etc. In this example we only need the simple features, so feel free to select either the simple or the advanced Hebrew version. The program now shows the well-known five tabs:
Since you are creating a new exercise, the description field is empty. Here you can write a text that provides some information about the exercise you are about to create. The text has no effect on the actual exercise; it merely serves as information for the user. You may, for example, write:
Select the “Universe” tab and indicate which part of the Old Testament you want to use for the exercise. This is only a suggestion for the user; as we have seen earlier, the universe can be altered when the exercise is run.
Depending on which database you have installed, you will either be able to select the entire OT or just Genesis 1-3. If you put at mark next to “Everything” the program will search the entire text:
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or |  |
The larger the universe, the more sentences 3ET will find; but the more sentences there are, the longer it will take the program to choose a sentence. Therefore it may be a good idea to limit the universe. On most computers a universe comprising the entire New Testament is no problem; but if the universe is the entire Old Testament, the program may appear somewhat slow.
Select the “Sentences” tab:
Here you can indicate the criteria which the program is to use when choosing sentences.
We shall return to the first two lines (“Use this for sentence unit selection” and “MQL statement to select sentences”) later. Make sure that “Friendly feature selector” is marked.
Next to “Sentence unit type” there is a drop-down list where you can choose between the types of sentence units available for exercises in this database. Here you can choose between “word”, “phrase” and others. (If you have chosen the “simple” version of the database instead of the “advanced” one, you only have one option here: Word.) Select “word” in this drop-down list.
Next to “Feature” there is another drop-down list. Here you can choose between the various features available for the selected sentence unit type. For words, the feature includes “Part of speech”, “Gender”, “Number” etc. Try selecting various features and note how the rest of the window changes. When you choose a particular feature, the program shows you the values that this feature may have. Finally press the “Clear” button.
The “Clear” button erases all the criteria.
For the exercise we are building here we need sentences containing words that...
This can be specified thus:
(Actually, in this example it is superfluous to require that the word should be a verb; if a word is marked as qal perfect, it is always a verb.)
The window now looks like this:
(You may have noticed that as you chose feature values, the text next to “MQL statement to select sentences” changed automatically. MQL is a command language that is used to specify how to search the database, and the statement here is the one actually used for your search. But feel free to ignore this for now. You may later read more about MQL here.)
The program now knows how to find sentences for the exercises, but we need to specify which sentence units this exercise is about. In this example, the words have to be chosen using exactly the same criteria as the sentences; so the words must be verbs of the qal stem in perfect tense. The tick mark next to “Use this for sentence unit selection” instructs the program to use the same criteria when selecting the interesting words. Try removing the tick next to “Use this for sentence unit selection” and the set it again; you will then see that the “Sentence Units” tab is only active when the tick mark is not set. (Make sure to leave the mark on.)
Now select the final tab, “Features”:
(When you open this tab, all the marks will be in the “Don’t care” column.) In the rightmost column you will see all the features that are available for the sentence unit called “word” in this database. The first feature is always “Text” and represent the actual word in the Bible verse; this is followed by the remaining features in alphabetical order. (You may need to use the scroll bar to view all the features.) Here you can choose which features to show to the user and which features the user must provide. In this example we want to show the actual word and ask the user to identify its gender, person and number. Place a mark in the column “Show” next to “Text” and in the column “Request” next to “Gender”, “Number” and “Person” as shown in the picture above.
The exercise is now ready. You may save it by selecting the File >
Save exercise menu item. Saved exercises have file names ending
in .3et.
You can now run the exercise by choosing the Run > Continuous menu item. You may then, for example, get this sentence from Genesis 3:1:
The correct answer is:
In fact, third person masculine singular is the answer to most questions posed by this exercise, simply because third person masculine singular is the most common perfect form in the Old Testament. This illustrates a feature of 3ET which is both a strength and a weakness: The most common word forms in the Bible also become the most common word forms in the exercises. This is an advantage since the program will then primarily drill students in the forms they will need most often; but it is a drawback if the student is well acquainted with the common word forms and needs to train the less frequent ones.
We shall now change the exercise so that other verb forms will appear more frequently. We can do this by changing the search criteria so that the program will only look for sentences containing verb forms that are not in the third person.
End the exercise by pressing “Finish” in the lower right corner. You are now back at the five tabs. Select the “Sentences” tab and select the feature “Person”. In the box under the feature selector you must now indicate that you are not interested in the third person. You can do this in two different ways:
If you run the exercise now, the program will choose sentences with verbs in the first or second person qal perfect.
If you are interested, you may proceed to a more advanced version of this exercise.
Go to main page Updated: 2009-11-27 09:04:08