A nice little update from Splash City

We are increasingly using Splash City to support young people to access their exams at school. The process of setting this up can be arduous, time consuming and, to coin a phrase, a bit of a pain in the Splash. For those unfamiliar with Splash City, it is a solution for recording maths work for those with physical disabilities. It provides the user with any and all physical recording tools for the completion of maths (and cross-curricular) work. It’s fantastic.

Arguably the most useful feature of this software is the ‘snap to’ function. This allows the user to attach the line, shape or tool they are recording to another element on the page. The simplest example of this is ‘snap to grid’ which means when you’re plotting points on a graph or drawing bars on a bar chart, they automatically align with the squared paper. If we are assessing someone's understanding of data handling or recording, their ability to hold a ruler in place shouldn’t be a factor. 

This feature works best when the graph has been set up within Splash itself (as above). So a teacher or TA has taken the time to set up a document, choose the appropriately sized squared/graph paper and drawn and labelled the axis. At this point, the user can easily interact with this content, snapping to grid to their heart’s content until we are certain we know how many children in class four prefer prawn cocktail to cheese and onion. In practice, the teacher already has a PDF on their computer that they have downloaded from twinkl spent hours putting together for their class to complete. They will hand this out at the start of the lesson and everyone will complete the task as instructed, the additional job of completely recreating this within Splash is not one well received. 

A handy feature of Splash is that it allows you to import said PDF and record straight over the top. This appears as a flat image on a page rather than an interactive document with ‘things’ that we can use. Our job is often to then draw over the elements we need to ‘snap to’; this might be angles to measure with the protractor, answer boxes to type into or an entire graph as we have already discussed. That way, our guys can concentrate on demonstrating their understanding rather than moving the mouse a tiny bit but not too much and a bit to the left and down a bit. This is the arduous, faffy bit of the process but one that is often essential in order for their best work to be demonstrated. That was until Splash 3.0.11.

Introducing ‘Automatic Page Grid’ and its trusty sidekick ‘Manually Place Grid’. These tools allow us to import a PDF into Splash and then allow the software to recognise the squared paper and automatically align it to a grid which - if you’ve been following - allows us to snap our work to it! 

In this example, we have manually placed the Grid over the element of the page we need to recognise and Splash has created its own grid over the top (shown in green). We are also able to confirm the number of cells within the marked area to ensure it has been recognised correctly. 

You can see here how my line is snapping itself to the subdivisions of the graph paper, allowing me to be very accurate with my placement (apologies for the GIF quality, if you can’t quite see what’s happening, I promise it’s that…) 

The reason I find this so exciting is because of the implications for exams access. Schools are given a finite amount of time prior to an exam to make any necessary adjustments to the paper prior to its completion. Setting up graphs ‘the old fashioned way’ was both time-consuming and often led to papers which don’t quite look like they did originally; this is not just an aesthetics issue (which is as much my issue as anyone else’s) but feels like the only right way to do it. Just because we are employing specialist software for physical access does not mean that we should accept sub-par presentation or be presented with a different paper to our peers. If we are able to make something even a tiny bit more inclusive, we absolutely should.

In order for this graph to be interactive, we had to snip the question from the original PDF and paste it onto a Splash background; we then had to re-draw the graph exactly as it appeared on the original and although it ultimately did the job, I think you'd agree it doesn't look the best.

There is a really useful 9-minute video on how the process works here and if you’d like any more information or support feel free to give us (or Stuart at Splash) a call.