Lesson 4: Creating a Jumbled Sentence Exercise

JMix is used to create mixed-up sentences or words where the student sees a list of words in the wrong order and must assemble them into the correct order. You can specify an unlimited number of different correct answers based on the words and punctuation in the base sentence, and a hint button prompts the student with the next correct word or segment of the sentence if needed. You can create two different versions of these exercises: HTML or DHTML (drag-and-drop menus). Click on the examples below to see the difference.

See a demonstration of an HTML jumbled sentence exercise (click on the words located in the bottom box in the right order) See a demonstration of a DHTML jumbled sentence exercise (drag the boxes on the right over the appropriate box on the left)

Beware: A drag-and-drop exercise can be very difficult to do if the page is too big for the user's screen; he or she will have to scroll around quite a lot, and may end up frustrated. The simpler HTML output is much more effective if you want to include a many jumbled words.

Assignment: In this lesson, you will create a jumbled sentence exercise. Time: 1 hour

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The Main JMix Window

This is the main window of JMix:

Step 2: Enter an exercise title and save

The title of the exercise you are currently working on should be entered in the box next to Title. It will become the main heading of the Web page you create. Save the file as lastname_jmix (for example, my file would be called tyler_jmix) into your Exercises folder. The program will automatically add a .jmx extension to your file. Once again, save your file regularly throughout this lesson!

Step 3: Enter a main sentence

Enter the main sentence to be mixed up in the window below Original Sentence. You must break up the sentence into separate segments making them as big or as small as you like. To do this, just put each segment on a separate line in the main text box. For example, to break up the sentence "Yes, we have no potatoes." into word segments, you would type this into the main sentence box:

Yes , we have no potatoes .

Note that the comma and period are also on separate lines so that they become separate segments.

This may seem like a little more work than before, but consider the advantages -- now you can have longer segments consisting of multi-word phrases such as "Henrico County". Also, you can break up one word into individual letters, to create a mixed-up word puzzle.

Special note on the apostrophe character: In many languages (including English), the single quotation mark ( ' ) is used both as an apostrophe and as a quotation marker:

He said, 'I need help.' (quotation marker)
I'm listening. (apostrophe)

In a JMix jumbled sentence exercise, it is difficult for the program to tell which of these is intended. The single quotation is therefore always treated as an apostrophe; if you want to use quotation marks, please use the double quotation ( " ) in JMix. It's probably best to avoid quotation marks altogether if you can.

Also, the angle bracket characters ( < and > ) are sometimes problematic on Web pages since they are the delimiters for HTML tags, so these should be avoided unless you are using HTML tags on purpose -- for example, by creating a drag-and-drop (V4 output) page which uses pictures instead of words.

Step 4: Enter alternate sentences

You may wish to allow alternate correct sentences which will be accepted by the program. For example, if your main sentence is "The potato, a root vegetable, is a staple food in England.", then you may wish to add the alternate sentence "The potato, a staple food in England, is a root vegetable." You can also include sentences which do not use all of the words and punctuation in the original if you wish -- for example, "The potato is a root vegetable." However, if you enter a sentence that contains a word or piece of punctuation which is not in the original sentence, the program will warn you.

You can enter up to 100 alternate sentences. Use the Up / Down buttons to move through the alternate sentences. Click on the Save Changes button to save the changes you have made to the alternate sentences list.

Alternate sentence options

You may wish to restrict your students to creating sentences which use all of the elements in the original sentence by checking the box next to Alternates must use all words. On the other hand, you may be prepared to allows shorter sentences which do not use all the elements to be accepted as correct. Setting the option here allows the program to check the alternate sentences for you when you start to create a web page and warn you if an alternate sentence does not include all the items in the main sentence.

Step 5: Configure your potato

JMix Configuration Details

JMix has more buttons than the other programs, because exercises allow the student to Undo previous actions, to Restart the exercise and to get a Hint. As in all the programs, however, all these buttons except for the Check button are optional.

The Prompts panel of the Configuration window has one special item, Always capitalize first letter. When this option is checked, the first letter of the student's answer will be capitalized (as it should be in a normal sentence) while the exercise is being completed. If you are creating mixed-up-word puzzles (by breaking up one word into separate letters), then you will probably want to turn this off.

Step 6: Make a web page!

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