I may have mentioned in this space that I have been working on three new apps, practice exams for Amateur Radio licensing. Well, after getting the Fraction Calculator squared away I am getting back to work on them. There will be one app for each of the three license classes, Technician, General and Amateur Extra. Oh, yes, I have to say this is for the United States only, since each country has its own Ham Radio licensing requirements. The technology is the same, but the implementations in each country aren’t necessarily the same.

Progress is such that I should have the Technician exam done within two weeks. Since the three exams are highly similar, it will be a piece of cake to adapt the General and Amateur Extra apps to their own question pools. A good deal of the work for this set of apps was adapting the files of the question pools into Xml so I could easily use Linq to import them to each app. This is finally complete and from now on it will be mainly a question of presentation and exam generation. The question pools contain hundreds of questions, but a given Ham exam will only present 35 of them in the case of Technician and General, or 50 in the case of Amateur Extra (known more popularly as simply “Extra”). Question selection is a major part of this.

I do have the design of the Main screen of each practice exam complete. Here they are:

I am hoping to have all three in the Marketplace by 10 April 2011.  We’ll see how well I meet that deadline!

Let me add a preliminary demo video of the Technician practice exam app:

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