Demonstration: Matching board type item

A Matching-board item asks the respondent to find pairs of elements that go together within a sort of checkerboard. The elements can be texts or images.

Here is a quiz entitled Cinéquiz-français that contains a Matching-board item, and whose subject is characters from Quebec films. I will choose this item and edit its content.

Under the Content tab, I wrote a title for the item, and then stated the question in which I ask the respondent to match the photos of actresses and actors with the names of films in which they acted.

The way to edit a Matching-board item is quite similar to that of Matching items, since we are using pairs of elements. We put one element in the Element column and the other in the Associated Element column. The elements can be either texts or images, depending on what I choose in the drop-down menu above the columns. I have inserted photos of actresses and actors in the Element column, and the names of films in which they played in the Associated element column. And like Matching items, the last column allows us to write feedback for each pair of elements, as needed.

Matching-board items have two main differences in comparison with Matching items. First, Matching-board items have a Mask image column, which includes a small image for each pair of matching elements and will be used to hide the element and its matching element in the checkerboard. The column already contains a default image that works perfectly, but you can change it as needed. Second, the checkerboard must include 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10 pairs of matching elements in order to function. The small icons, x and +, at the end of each line allow you to either delete or add a pair of elements.
Under the Add-ons tab, I did not add anything for this item. I could have written the source of my photos in an information field, for example.

This type of question includes, under the Parameters tab, in addition to the parameters that are common to all of the question types (Weighting, Automatically start media and Display correct answer), some parameters that are special to Matching-board items:

• The parameter Background colour of the element and Background colour of the associated element allow you to add a background colour to the squares of the checkerboard. I chose white for the background of my photos and grey for the background of the film titles.
• The parameter Type of display for the elements offers two display options. If we choose the option Masked from the beginning, the squares of the checkerboard are hidden to start with, and the respondent must expose them by successively finding the elements that make up the pairs. In this way, the exercise is a sort of memory game. If we choose the option Not masked from the beginning, the squares of the checkerboard will not be hidden. This way, the respondent will cover them as he or she connects the matching pairs of elements. And so, the exercise resembles a Matching question.

I chose the second option for my item. Let’s click on the Preview button to see what the quiz will look like once it is published. My squares are all uncovered. The objective is to hide them by finding all the matching pairs. If I click on two squares that are not associated, nothing will happen. But if I click successively on two elements that are correctly associated, they become hidden. And so it goes until all the squares of the checkerboard are hidden.

And that explains Matching-board items!