Embedding a small graphing calculator alongside a question for students

Good morning! My school is looking to format our assessments so that they look similar to our state assessments. Part of this is giving students access to a graphing calculator on certain questions, while not giving it to them on others. I realize that I can add a graphing calculator to every single student slide (which is a feature I am VERY happy has been added!). However, I was wondering if there was any way of only adding it to certain slides. Thanks!

If you go into the screen CL (ie. the </> button next to “Teacher Tips”), you can add a line such as

disableCalculatorReason: "No calculator allowed on this screen"

and it will turn the calculator off for that screen. I’m not sure that you can prevent savvy students from going back to a previous, calculator-enabled slide and using that one instead, however…

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You could put a submit button and have a conditional disableCalculatorReason.

disableCalculatorReason: when button1.pressCount>0 "Question complete" otherwise ""
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Thank you for the help! If I were to do something like this, could a student simply by-pass this by not clicking “submit” until they were completely done with the test?

Thank you for the help! I did not realize that this command was an option.

Yes they could (or go ahead to another question with a calculator once they realize it disables from the button). It’s not bulletproof. You could get code crazy and hide/lock out future questions until prior ones are submitted, but that gets to be a lot of work!

Gotcha! Would you care to tell me how to do that? I may end up deciding not to do it for every test, but if they learn that they can’t do for the first couple of tests, I might not have to worry about it on the rest of them. :wink:

There is this prior thread, just change the conditions to suit your needs. I recommend thoroughly testing as you could lock students out of an entire activity if you haven’t coded well.

I’d also recommend adding another condition set to some variable you can toggle on an initial slide, so you don’t have to go through and answer every single question to test individual slides.

... when note1.script.testMode="yes" "" ...

Thank you so much for all your help! I ended up grouping the non-calculator questions all at the end of the test and the calculator questions all at the beginning. I put a submit button between them. Then, I set the questions in part A (along with their calculator function) to hide when the button press count was greater than 0. Simultaneously, part B appears when the button press count is greater than 0. It worked quite well… I just quickly copy-pasted the same line of code to each slide.

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