Well after a lot of hard work we have just started beta testing uHavePassed - which is our new driving theory test practice for mobile phones service.
It has taken a long time to develop as we have been developing a platform that will allow us to synchronise data between the website and the mobile phone. This may sound simple but can become quite complex quite quickly.
With our service you can practice mock driving theory tests both on-line at your computer and “offline” on your phone. We have spent a long time researching how people prepare for the UK drving theory test and this has shown us several things.
- Practice for this test really does make perfect. The official question bank is published by the Driving Standards Agency and if you practice all of those questions you can then guarantee that you will be seeing a question you know on the day. The question bank contains 1000+ questions though.
- Students take a range of different approaches to revising for the test - from the extreme of no preparation to the other end of the spectrum - reading the highway code and another book and practising all questions.
- Going through 1000+ questions can become quite tedious and boring. In the "real" test you get 50 minutes but most students will only take half of that time.
- If you only practice the tests it is quite hard to understand how you can improve your performance - and it is hard to track your progress and find your weak areas.
We wanted to ensure that as students had reason to take both on-line and “off-line” tests - that they wouldn’t face duplicate questions on each platform. Also analysis of the results seemed to be key to providing a good service for students and we realised this analysis must cover all of the results.
There was also some technical reasons for developing our synchronisation platform, because phones are limited on their resources - we could not install all of the questions on the phone - 1000+ questions and 400+ images would exceed the storage on the phone.
As a final way of engaging the students we are creatign simple games to re-inforce various concepts that are important for the driving theory test.
We think that we have developed not only an interesting and engaging way for students to practice and prepare for the driving theory test, but also a great platform to build other mobile based assesents.
We are looking for students to sign up for our beta test - so if you are aware of anyone taking the driving theory test in the near future who would appreciate free access to the entire question bank in return for testing our software - please send them to http://uHavePassed.com/beta.