create fast, check easy

Hi! My name is Andrey and I have been in IT for over 25 years, giving private lessons. As a teacher, you are probably familiar with the situation when you need to quickly conduct a cross-section of students' knowledge. Usually, we print out tests for this and spend time manually checking them. But why complicate things when there is a convenient tool? Every schoolchild now has a smartphone with a camera, almost everyone uses Telegram.

I have developed a Telegram bot constructor “Bot in a Notepad” that allows you to easily create tests, automatically check answers and calculate points. No need to delve into programming or complex flowcharts – just write questions and answers in a regular text editorand the bot will do everything for you.

Imagine that you want to conduct a test on past versions of the Unified State Exam or Basic State Exam. Easy! You can simply transfer questions to a file, and the system will automatically calculate the points, highlight the correct answers and save the results. Moreover, the constructor allows you to identify “bottlenecks” in the respondents' knowledge right during testing.

How does this work?

Let's say you are writing a lesson plan, for example, on history. While you are writing the lesson plan, you can make small footnotes in a separate file or right in the footer of the lesson plan, in the form of a question and answer options. It is better to do this in a separate file, let's say that we are planning to conduct a test at the end of the quarter, then we will collect all the questions in the file “Final test.txt” and add questions to it as we work on the lessons, gradually.

As an example, let's take questions from one lesson on the topic of the reign of Peter the Great:

T: Introduce yourself. Enter your first and last name.
What class are you from?
— 10A
— 10B
I will ask a few questions about the reign of Peter the Great.
– Fine
What title did Peter I take in 1721?
– Tsar
— Emperor||Y5
– Prince
– Grand Duke
Which reform of Peter I affected the calendar system in Russia?
— Transition to the Gregorian calendar
— Introduction of a new calendar from the Nativity of Christ||Y10
— Transition to the Islamic calendar
— Introduction of the decimal system
Which city was founded by Peter I in 1703 and became the new capital of Russia?
– Moscow
— Saint Petersburg||Y5
– Kazan
– Tver
Which war lasted almost the entire reign of Peter I and ended in 1721?
— Crimean War
— Northern War||Y10
— The Seven Years' War
— Napoleonic Wars
What was the main result of the Northern War for Russia?
— Annexation of Siberia
— Access to the Baltic Sea||Y10
— Access to the Black Sea
— Conclusion of an alliance with France
Answers accepted! Thank you!
– Ok

It looks like a regular list of questions and answers, except that some answers have a suffix like “||Y10”, where “Y” denotes the correct answer, and “10” is the number of points awarded for it. In principle, you can do “||Y” or “||10”, depending on what you want to count. Counting correct answers does not allow you to assign a “question weight”, with counting points it is more difficult to think through a system of their significance, but each correct answer can contribute to the points pool (simple less, difficult more). But in reality, this is a ready-made telegram bot, all that remains is to process it correctly and send it to students.

If you pay attention, some questions are preceded by prefixes – English letters with a colon (T:…D:…X:…) thus the type of the expected answer is set: if there is no prefix, it is a button; T – text answer; D – answer in numbers; # – enter a phone number, X – any answer (text, photo, video, document, voice…). If the answer does not match the expected type, the bot will ask the question again. Everything is very simple, but this method of creating surveys is very convenient, because for each situation you can quickly create your own version of the test, up to a separate test for each class, with different questions. In the control panel, in the settings, you can specify that the student can take the test only once, this will save us from duplicates.

There is text, what next?

Just copy it and go to https://botpad.ru/ insert into the form to create a dialogue, click “View result” and on the next page we get links to the working demo bot and addresses for viewing the results (here you need to understand that only the administrator will see this information in working mode). Click on the link or scan the QR code with your mobile camera, you can print it out, hang it on the board and then the students will be able to start the test by simply pointing the camera at the QR code. The first link will take you to the demo bot and it will start the survey. After the last question, in 2-3 seconds the bot will send you a message where you can see the results of the survey (this is only in demo mode, for your convenience).

How to check the results?

The results of all students who have passed the test will be summarized in one Google Table, the correct answers will be highlighted in green, the number of correct answers, the number of points scored and the time spent on passing the test will be indicated opposite each name. You can sort by different criteria.

Great, but this is a demo bot, and I want to make my own

Launching your bot is not much more difficult. Go to the constructor https://botpad.ru/cp/, log in via Telegram, click “Quick start”, enter the bot key received from the BotFather bot and paste the survey text. That's it! Your bot starts a survey for all users who launched it!

So simple! What's the catch?

There is no catch, but the test results are initially saved only in the constructor database, where you can see them immediately. And if you want to save the results in Tables, CRM, respond to students who filled out the questionnaire via a bot, receive notifications by mail, etc., click the “Bot integrations” button and after simple settings everything will work as in the demo version. Integrations for each bot are connected once. Everything is described in the textbook, the link to it is on the website and in the constructor.

Does the designer have any other abilities?

Yes, there are many! You can give different results depending on the results, limit the number of attempts, give a hidden link to the bot and only the student who receives it will be able to take the survey, you can make buttons for different tests and much more, I wrote detailed instructions, there is a link to it on each page of the constructor and the site.

What's in the plans

Now we see the answers in tables, and we can build diagrams from them, but we need to make an effort. The next step will be a test report that will list the questions and indicate the number of answers for each option and display a diagram. It will be beautiful and clear!

Any questions left?

I will be happy to answer them and help you figure them out, you can ask them in the comments here or in the comments on my channel https://t.me/BotNotePad Subscribe!