Using My Books to Build Question Banks

Magma has got a huge library of questions built in. But sometimes you might have a specific question in mind that just isn’t there. Well, luckily we can actually add our own questions to Magma and we can save them in our own question book to use whenever we need to.

I’m going to tap onto My Books in the bottom left-hand corner. And straight away you can see I’ve got a couple of questions here already. On the left-hand side, this is my book and I can add chapters and subchapters into it. Let’s go ahead and make a brand new chapter. Just for this video, we’ll call it Warm-Up Questions. Inside this chapter, we’re then going to add a subchapter. I’m going to call it Multiplication to begin with.

Now, at this stage, we have a blank section with no questions there at all. We can add questions in the top right-hand corner. And we can choose existing questions from Magma if you want to curate your own collection, or you can create your own questions from scratch.

To begin with, let’s grab a couple in Magma already. So perhaps you want to curate a selection of popular questions into one assignment so you can access them easily next time. All I need to do is navigate to the book I want that’s there already, find the chapter and subchapter, and then select questions just like you’re creating your own assignment. You can even jump between books and chapters and get questions from anywhere you like, and then add them into your own book. And then when you’ve got them, you simply press Add to My Book in the top right-hand corner.

But of course, one of the reasons you’re probably going to want to use My Books is to create your own questions for your learners. So we’re going to add a new question in the top corner. And this time we’re going to press Create New.

From here we get Magma’s question editing interface, and it’s a really powerful tool to create your own questions. In its simplest form, we can simply type in a question in the top toolbar. For example, What is 8 × 3? And then we can type in the answer in the answer box underneath. Now, there’s loads more detail here, but for now let’s just add this really simple question. And we’re going to add it as a fluency question. All I need to do is press Save in the top corner, and now that question appears in my book for me.

But we can go way deeper than this. Let’s add another question. This time we’ll add an image to the question. You’ve seen in Magma already where you can drag and drop the picture from the side onto your canvas, and we can add that to our own bespoke questions as well.

All we’re going to do is tap on Problem Image on the right-hand side and we can then navigate to wherever that image is saved. I’m going to get one from my camera roll, and I can simply tap on the image and insert it like this. This will now be a fully interactive element for my students, so they can drag it onto the canvas to work with.

We can also add a canvas image as a separate asset, which will be an image that immediately appears on the canvas itself. So perhaps you’re doing an exercise measuring angles and you want to have angles on the canvas to use a protractor on top of. Well, you can add that here in the exact same way as the problem image. And you can have both images if you want to.

Then we can simply type in the question to go with the image. And just like before, we’re going to choose the answer in the answer box here. Again, we can go deeper still, but let’s add this question for now. This one’s going to be a problem-solving question. And we’ll press Save.

We’ve now got two brand new questions in this subchapter, but let’s add a third one. And this time we’ll use the built-in, incredibly powerful equation editor.

I’m going to make a new question just like before, but this time on the right-hand side I want to draw your attention to all the different symbols and functions here. We can tap on these to add them to our text box, or we can tap on More to use the equation editor.

You can see straight away we’ve got a bunch of different symbols and operators here. We can go from Basic to Algebra and to Advanced as well to get even more functions. Now, I know I’ve kind of abandoned my multiplication theme for this topic here anyway. So let’s go for a fractions question now, and we’re going to add two mixed fractions together.

We can do that by using the different controls in the equation editor to add a fraction, the plus symbol, and another fraction. This is a really complex tool and it is a little bit more tricky to use than just typing into the text box. In fact, it might take a little bit of trial and error the first time you use it. I found that for me it’s been fiddly tapping into the boxes on the fractions, but as soon as you’ve got the hang of it you can then create the most complex and elaborate questions that you need to.

And you can also use these different functions in the answer as well if you want your student to answer in a fraction or however else it might be.

And speaking of answer, let’s have a little look at how that box works. There are actually four different ways you can set your answers. The one I’ve been using so far is just the maths entry answer. This is where the student is going to handwrite or type in the number which you specify here.

There are little toggles to require units - if you’re writing in centimetres you’d have to put centimetres down - and also to require simplification, so your student would have to express the fraction in its lowest possible form, for example.

But we also have some other settings here. The next one is called Single Select, and it’s basically multiple choice. So you might have four different versions of the answer and you’re going to tap the little box next to the one which is correct.

The next one is Multi Select. And as you can probably guess, you can have more than one correct answer. And again, you can tap on the little green circles to tell Magma which ones the correct answers are.

And then finally, we have the Ordered option. This is where we can choose which order these numbers should go in by tapping the green circles in that sequence. Then the student will have them presented randomly and they have to drag and drop them into the correct order.

For this question, we’ll use the Single Select option, and I’ve made sure to highlight 10 as the correct answer. Now, when I save this question, it will appear in my book just like the other ones.

Of course, we can now start creating assignments using our questions. So, I’ll go back to my home screen, create a brand new assignment in the top corner, and this time I’m going to choose My Book. And look - it’s there! I can go on to Warm-Up Questions, I can go on to Multiplication (which we’ve already established most of these questions aren’t anymore, but hey), and I can see all the questions there. I can select them just like I would do in any other assignment.

So that’s the My Book screen in Magma - an incredibly powerful tool where you can curate your own collection of questions or you can make your own questions there too. So go on, have a little explore and see if you can start building your own bank of questions specifically for your learners in your class.

And that’s it. I’ll see you again for some more Magma tips soon.