Question Master for Inspire, Improved

This is a straight-forward demonstration of what can be achieved in the classroom with the right geek-out tools. The video is intended for a general audience, but does use some teacher-talk. First of all, it’s clear that I’m actually solving a problem here. I have a class where vocabulary training is something I need to focus on. I have some software that lets me put up some nice presentations to reinforce the vocabulary items. Thank god for the Question Master thingie in Promethean’s Inspire product.

But then I found myself doing the same thing again and again. That’s when I decided that Question Master for Inspire sucks hard. How many times have we done that to our software? “If you could just do THIS then IIII could do THAT.”

So I decide to make a script that basically acts like a remote control on Question Master and it does exactly what I want how I want, like a well-trained pet is supposed to.

This “program” (more accurately called a “script”, though) was written in AppScript under Python. The same could be achieved using Applescript, but using appscript under Python gives you some serious geek leverage to do a lot more with it, and it took less time to write.

I figure I spent about a weekend perfecting it, and ever since then takes me a few minutes to do what used to take me hours. Well worth the effort.

In case you’re wondering, it’s not “production-ready” yet, which is just a fancy way of saying that I was too lazy to bother with error handling. So I’m not quite able to share the source code for others. This is a goal though. (He says, among tens of dozens of other goals.)