Internet Learning Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2014 | Page 45

Internet Learning
distractors for each level. A minimum
of four question / answer pairs are required
for each level.
4. Specify a course to use the activity in.
Assigning an activity to a ‘Course’ helps
faculty keep tracking information organized.
SmashFact offers a means by which
to track and produce customized analytics
via detailed reports on students’ progress,
which can be imported into MS Excel or
most learning management systems.
A ‘Dashboard’ keeps activities organized,
and lets the faculty know how many
students are using their activity.
SmashFact offers a means by which
to track and produce customized analytics
via detailed reports on students’ progress,
which can be imported into MS Excel or
most learning management systems.
Testing Assumptions
SmashFact.com launched on November
26th, 2013, and the student apps
became available for download from
Amazon, Google Play and iTunes on January
8th, 2014. As of January 8, 2015 (on year
to the date of the app release) SmashFact
now has over 428 faculty users and is in 102
colleges and universities institutions across
the U.S. and Canada.
The app itself is designed to refresh
activity data every time it is opened on the
student’s device. This was intended to let
faculty add, adjust or rewrite questions as
the semester progresses. Faculty can use
this feature to progressively build the activity
as the semester moves forward, customizing
and modifying the content as needed
along the way. One approach is to add
a level for each lecture or chapter or week
covered in class, giving faculty the means to
stay ahead of the course’s delivery without
having to design the whole activity upfront.
Each time students re-launch the Smash-
Fact app, the new information is refreshed.
SmashFact is suitable for most subjects
and for most grade levels. The purpose
of the activity is to facilitate lower-level
learning, focusing on drill and practice of
facts, terms and their definitions, and recognition
of ideas and concepts. The app is
also helpful for bringing students back up
to speed after a long and academically lazy
summer. SmashFact activities can also be
designed for one course and reused for remediation
in later semesters during higher-level
course work.
Although the app was designed primarily
for college students, the structure and
purpose of the product lends itself to learning
that occurs in the K-12 environment as
well. During beta testing, I created a simple
SmashFact activity for my first grader. “Addition
and Subtraction” has helped my son
and his peers drill simple math problems. In
one week, these simple drills helped my son
achieve a perfect score on his timed math
tests, where he was having difficulty even
finishing before.
SmashFact has been modified to facilitate
508-compliance. The SmashFact app
interface by design was to aid those with
poor vision, by using big buttons and bold
contrasting type for questions and answers.
Student feedback is delivered in traditional
color form (green for correct and red
for incorrect) and also delivered audibly. A
smash sound indicates a right answer while
a golf club swing/miss indicates a wrong answer.
Faculty click a link to have all of their
SmashFact content (with the exception of
images) exported in a standard HTML file
which can be read by most screen readers,
top to bottom, left to right. The activity can
be refreshed by the student to allow the answers
and distractors to be randomly delivered
for further practice.
44