It's been a while since I've updated the news, but it's not because we've been slacking off on development!  One of the very large and complex sections of The Problem Site is the "Printables" section, where we provide jumbles, mazes, word searches, and a variety of worksheets.

In redesigning this section of the site, there is a lot of behind-the-scenes work that needed to be done to give users maximum flexibility in designing their worksheets.  

With most of that work done, we have some Jumbles, Word Searches, and Cross Search puzzles available for you to try.  Just follow this link: Word-Lists, and then choose a word list from the Featured Lists.

Or you can go directly to a sample word list by clicking here: Solar System Vocabulary.

Pro Membership

In addition to having an ad-free experience, Pro Members will also have access to the ability to build their own quizzes, reference pages, and word lists for Jumbles and Word Searches.  As a limited time offer, we'll be inviting beta testers to try out some Pro Member features, without charge; if you're interested in testing Pro Member features, please fire me an email at dtwitchell@virtu-software.com to let me know.  Please include your username in the email.

No, the title of this blog post isn't really asking you a question (although we definitely want you to tell us whenever you find something wrong!).  We're just letting you know that the What Is Wrong? game is available to play.  Very little has changed in this game, except that we've done some graphic redesign to make it prettier.

In other news: You'll notice that if you arrive at the testing version from the old site, you'll get a dialog window providing some basic info about the new site.  The reason for that is that we've opened the "audience" for the testing version wider, and we want to make sure people who are new to the testing version get all the pertinent information when they first arrive.

If you get sick of seeing that popup window, you no longer have to get to the test version by way of the old site; you can just bookmark "theproblemsite.net" and come here directly!

A few days ago I posted that we had 3 of the quizzes from the old version of the site posted on the new version.  Since then we've been hammering away at converting the rest of the quizzes over, and creating quite a few new ones.

Not only are the addition/multiplication/subtraction/division quizzes on the new site, but you also have more fine-tuned control of what you practice; you can choose from options like "Multiplication by 5" which would give you all the multiplication facts for 5.

We also have several new Literature and French Number quizzes.

I think the hardest one I've seen is the Novel First Lines quiz.  I confess, I didn't do very well with that one!

Many of the quizzes have more than 10 questions, which means you can try the quiz multiple times, and get some different questions each time you try.

Eventually, this section of the site will be set up so teachers can create their own quizzes.

To view the complete listing of quizzes, visit the Quiz Directory.

We took a short break from games to work on quizzes.  The old version of the site had many online quizzes, and all of them will eventually be translated over to the new site.  We started out with just three - two are geography quizzes, and one is a quiz about famous explorers.  Each quiz has 10 questions, but in some cases they draw from a larger pool of questions, so you can do the same quiz multiple times and get different questions.  For example, the "Asian Capitals" quiz has 29 countries and capitals, so the 10 question quiz is never quite the same each time you try it.

You can find the quizzes here: Quizzes!

Number Quest is the newest game on the site.  This game is renamed from "Secret Number" on the old site.  The reasoning for the change is simply that what used to be called "Secret Number II" was by far the more popular of the games, and we wanted to name it simply "Secret Number."  Thus, the game formerly known as "Secret Number" needed a new name.

In the new version of Secret Number, you don't have to select questions from a drop down list.  Instead, you check the questions you want to ask (yes, you can ask multiple questions at once!) and then click "Ask."

Beware of asking too many questions at once: you start with 1000 points, but you spend 25 points on each question you ask, and 50 points each time you click "Ask."  Thus, you will get the best score if you think carefully about how you "bunch" your questions.

You will lose 200 points every time you make an incorrect guess.

When you are ready to guess, you can either type your number, or use the keypad to enter your guess.