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version 3.7+ PC
PERSKOLA Copyright (c) Per Scherman 1989-1996 Ålegårdsgatan 238 S-431 5O MÖLNDAL Sweden
PERSKOLA is written in and compiled with QuickBASIC. Therefore the following applies to the program: Portions (c) Copyright Microsoft Corporation 1982 - 1988 All Rights reserved.
Do not approach Microsoft with any questions regarding this program since they have no responsibility for it.
The PERSKOLA program files are shareware in that sense that they may be copied freely to private persons. If these persons use the program I expect them to show there gratitude for the idea and work I have put into the program. A suitable way to show your gratitude would be to send me the equivalence of 70 Swedish Kronor (13 US Dollars or 7 British Pounds). If you send the money after 1991 please make adjustment for inflation. Don't forget to give your full name and address. Please also write what version of this program you have.
The program may not be used in schools or in business without my permission.
Note that programming is just a hobby of mine. I can take no responsibility for the program or its use. You shall know, however, that my children and many of their friends have used PERSKOLA since February 1989 with splendid results. The children's thoughts and comments have greatly influenced the making of this program.
Please send me YOUR thoughts and comments as well.
Have a flexible mind when you test PERSKOLA. From my experience open minded children are the ones that most easily adopt to the program. They do not get stuck for fear of doing something wrong with the program. Use this manual as a guide and not as a perfect description of the program. When you run the program the first few times, read all the text that you find on the screen. Then very soon you'll handle the program as well as your children.
The program will only work properly if the following files are kept in the same directory.
You may download the files from internet now!
PSCHOOL.EXE MENY2.EXE SCHOOL2.EXE INVERT2.EXE TEACHER2.EXE APPEND2.EXE LIST2.EXE HELP3.EXE HELP4.EXE BRUN45.EXE
There also has to be a sub directory called FACIT.
If you use your hard disk FACIT should be a subdirectory to the directory in which you have put the PERSKOLA program files.
Also see "Problems" below.
If you have stored the program on your hard disk, just go to that directory and give the command PSCHOOL.
Or even better make an icon with the help of the programme manager.
Note that the screen displayed by PERSKOLA always contains information about what to do next. If you get stuck do read ALL THE INFORMATION on the screen.
If the colors used by the program did not appeal to you for some reason, you can change them by starting PERSKOLA in a slightly different way.
Use the PSCHOOL/a/b/c/ command instead. a, b and c should be numbers in the range 0 to 15. The numbers represent the three colors that are used in the program. They should all be different from each other. To quickly find out if the colors are OK type INFO when the program makes its first halt.
You will now be asked to choose a subject or select listing of questions.
The subjects are TYPewriter, ENGlish, SWEdish, FREnch, GERman, MATh, CHEmistry, GEOgraphy and SPEcial.
If you answer -SWEdish, -FREnch, -GERman or -SPEcial the programme will invert the interrogation to ask for the meaning of the foreign words.
After choosing one of the alternatives the program will ask for the student's name
Instead of giving the name of the student you can give a special command as described below.
If you want to add, change or delete questions you must type EDIT instead of the student's name.
If you want to run the exercise there are three basic alternatives:
Of course the program will eventually prompt you for the name of the student if you choose one of the first two alternatives.
If you don't know if there are any questions for the student in a given subject you can get a list of all files in the directory FACIT by typing ?
When you have given the name of the student the program needs to know which questions you want to practice.
A negative number will make the program choose so many questions starting from the end of the file viz the last added questions.
A positive number will make the program choose so many questions starting from the beginning of the file.
If you answer 0 you will be prompted for the number of the first question and the number of the last question.
Now the interrogation starts.
You will get a randomly selected question.
If you give the wrong answer the program will give you a hint. If you still can't answer the question you will get help, but it will not let you off the hook until you have given the right answer.
After the correct answer you'll get a new randomly selected question. However the question is chosen from those the program thinks you haven't given enough right answers to, so far.
THIS IS WHAT MAKES THIS PROGRAM OUTSTANDING. THE PROGRAM QUICKLY FINDS OUT WHICH QUESTIONS NEEDS EXTRA PRACTISE AND CONCENTRATES ON THESE QUESTIONS.
At any time during the exercise you can quit by giving the answer END to a question.
You can resume the exercise at a later time as the program continuously saves information on the student's progress on the diskette.
If you get a question for which you have absolutely no answer type ? for help.
Keyboards are different. By typing special key sequences you can use certain foreign characters.
They are composed of two or three keys all starting with the comma-key (,).
Certain foreign characters can be obtained by first pressing the comma-key, the associated letter and, often a letter defining what is special about the desired character.
(This document uses the features of HTML 3.2. If there is not a single character in front of each equal sign below, your browser might not fully comply to HTML 3.2. But don't worry. PERSKOLA will display the following table when you need it.)
Vowels with acute accent: á=,aa é=,ea í=,ia ó=,oa ú=,ua Vowels with grave accent: à=,ag è=,eg ì=,ig ò=,og ù=,ug Vowels with circumflex: â=,ac ê=,ec î=,ic ô=,oc û=,uc Vowels with trema: ä=,at ë=,et ï=,it ö=,ot ü=,ut &ydiereis;=,y diaeresis) Special consonants: ç=,c ñ=,n &bgr;=,s Swedish characters: å=,ar ä=,ae ö=,oe
Rule:
a for acute accent c for circumflex g for grave accent t for two dots ,trema
r for the ring over a in å e for the dots in ä and ö
You get CAPITAL letters in the same way. e.g. É=,EA
Press the comma-key twice to get a comma. ,=,,
In general to get a vowel with an acute accent: type the comma, then the vowel and then the a-key. So you will get é by 3 key strokes:
Note the é will not appear until you press the a-key.
Note you will need to press the comma-key twice to get the comma- character.
Now you know how to make the program conduct an exercise.
We shall now see how to create new questions and change or delete old ones.
As said above you must type EDIT instead of your name to invoke the edit mode.
The program will ask for the name again. Type the name of the student.
The name must not include blanks. Note the computer might treat å and Å as two different letters. The same goes for ä and Ä, and ö and Ö.
The program wants to know if you want to
Answer 1, 2 or 3 depending on your choice.
If you have selected the option to change old questions you will be asked to give the number of the first question you want to change.
Then you will be asked for how many questions you want to change (or for case 2 want to add).
Be sure not to address questions that do not exist. That could cause creation of empty questions. There is no way to answer an empty question correctly so this could give you a real problem during interrogation.
Read "Problems" to see how to cope with such a problem.
(Choice 3 above allows you to append questions from some other student in addition to deleting your own questions.
What happens then depends on what SUBJECT you have chosen. Most subjects requires one question and two correct answers.
Note that the program asks for two answers. The reason is that often there are more than one answer that you as a teacher want the program to accept as correct. If there only is one answer, just press ENTER instead of giving a second answer.
If you instead of a question respond with a / (slash) the editor will quit asking for new questions.
You can scan through the questions with the possibility making changes in a similar way. You give the number of the first question and the number of questions to be scanned through. If a question is OK then just press ENTER. If you want to change it just write the question and the two answers as you want them. You may interrupt by typing / in the same way as described above.
The maximum length of a question is 26 characters including blanks. Therefore a question can be a whole sentence like: We are having tea.
You can quit typing new questions by typing / instead of a question even if you haven't given as many questions as you first told the program.
When you have given the previously declared number of questions and answers, or when you have stopped by typing /, you will get a list of the questions you have just finished.
The numbers shown above each line with questions mean: #, Number of questions, Number of faulty answers, and Number of consecutive correct answers.
If you wanted a list with all questions you should have started by stating that no 1 was your first question to change. Then you should have answered that you only wanted to change 1 question. Then you should have accepted the first question without changing it by just pressing ENTER.
Also note, you can get extra assistance by typing HELP instead of the name of the student after invoking the edit mode.
As question write the name of the finger to be used.
As answer press the key to be used and then press ENTER as after all messages to the program.
A second answer is not to be given in this case.
This program was originally made for the AMIGA computer. Since the AMIGA can speak it is easy to exercise spelling by letting it say the words to be spelled.
With the PC-version of the program you have to describe the word instead.
So as a question describe the word. As the one and only answer write the word to be spelled.
Your question will appear after the words 'What is ...' unless your question starts with the letters H (as i How) or W (as i What).
Example.
Your question: The program asks: pi What is pi What is pi What is pi 7 * 8 What is 7 * 8 How many grams are 1 kg How many grams are 1 kg
For easy handling of long questions, there are a number of type-questions to be completed.
Before asking for the question the program asks for the type number of the question.
After that the program asks you to complete the question and give the two answers.
Type-questions:
0 ... 1 Which element is this: ... 2 What is the formula for ... 3 What compound is this: ...
For easy handling of long questions, there are a number of type-questions to be completed.
Before asking for the question the program asks for the type number of the question.
After that the program asks you to complete the question and give the two answers.
Type-questions:
0 ... 1 Which is the capital of ... 2 Which country is next to ... 3 Which is the world's ... 4 What is the name of former ... 5 In which continent is ... 6 Which is the highest mountain in ... 7 How high is ... 8 In which county can you find ... 9 Which river flows through ... 10 By which city does this river end: ...
Special is meant to cover other subjects than typewriter, English, French, German, Swedish, math, chemistry and geography.
If you whish to practise Spanish, call it SPECIAL.
Input of questions is quite similar to the other languages.
If you instead of a subject had given the word LIST at the beginning of the program you would have started a routine for the listing of questions and answers including statistical results from interrogations.
The way to run this part of the program is very similar to that which is described in chapter 4 above.
The printer should be set to IBM US-standard. The program can not handle a situation when the printer runs out of paper. However you can order the program to only list on the screen.
Every user will get a specific file for each subject. The desired file is defined by the name of the user and that particular subject.
The files can be found in the sub directory FACIT.
Look in your MS-DOS manual to find out how to copy files. Use the DIR command to find out exactly how the names of the PERSKOLA files are constructed. Note that the total length of a file name including extension is limited.
After copying someone's file reset the statistics in the new file by using the RESET command as described in chapter 4 above.
You can also add someone's questions to your own.
You can do that by after having given the EDIT command choose alternative 3.
Then give the name of that person whose questions should be appended. Answer NONE if you merely wants to delete some of your own questions.
Choose an alternative that suits your purpose.
If you only wanted to append some of someone's question you have to make it in two steps; first append all of them, then delete the ones you don't want.
Do you think this seems difficult?
It is not.
Just relax and read all that is printed on the screen the first few times you run the program. Then you will very soon be able to control the program without difficulty.
If the program should crash, don't panic. Just restart it. The chances are good that both the program and all the questions are intact on the disk (or hard disk if you run the program from the hard disk).
However, just in case it's advisable to now and then make a back-up disk. Why not label it PERSKOLA 3 by using LABEL in MS-DOS.
The worst problem would probably be if you for some reason got empty questions in your file.
The medicine is choice 3 under EDIT, viz removal of old questions.
When you have chosen 3 under EDIT the program will ask you whose questions you want to append to you own. Answer NONE. Then choose 1 viz possibility to delete any question. Then just go through the questions one by one and delete those questions that you find strange.
If you run PERSKOLA from the hard disk you must invoke it from that very directory were the PERSKOLA exe-files reside unless you have defined a path to the directory in your autoexec.bat. If you have defined such a path and want to invoke PERSKOLA from outside the directory you need to use the full command including path as described below.
Normally you invoke PERSKOLA with just PSCHOOL. However if you don't like the default colors used by the program; you can invoke PERSKOLA with the full command PSCHOOL/a/b/c/path where a, b and c are integers between 0 and 15 defining the colors you want the program to use. Path tells which drive and directory contains PERSKOLA's program files.
Example 1: PSCHOOL/7/0/4/ Example 2: PSCHOOL/7/0/4/c:school\ Example 3: PSCHOOL////c:school\
Note that different color codes might give the same result on a monochrome screen. This means that badly chosen color codes could hide text on the screen!!!
At last something about this version of PERSKOLA.
Files with questions that were created with version 3.3 or earlier can't be used with this version.
Unwanted questions can be deleted
Questions belonging to someone else can be appended to your own questions.
A new subject SPECIAL has been introduced. You can use it for your Spanish or whatever you want.
You can type å, ä and ö regardless of what keyboard you have.
Please send me your comments. In that way the next version can be better.
You are visitor no since 1996-12-03.