I’m very much enjoying it! The distractor answers are usually a good match for the correct answer. One issue - it doesn’t seem to recognize my iNat userid. I matched the case, but no go.
Is it built on a limited import from iNat? After playing a few times in my geographic area, mostly the same plants and combinations show up - it would make sense to beta it with a limited set 
It would be nice if it remembered my entered location from the previous time - either keep it filled in or a flag to say “same as last time”.
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Cool.
All the options though are one name and four pictures.
How about one picture and four names?
And for the “seriously advanced” - no clues: just one picture and you fill in the name (?and - easy - any valid scientific or common name or synonym, or - hard - only the current scientific name (given that common names vary from country to country)) from scratch?
Does it store our scores (and perhaps summarize them)? Any chance of comparing my score against an average?
I love the idea that this might perhaps have different levels, where I could use it to self-train a particular group, starting with an easy level (common - widespread - species with proportionately few recorded misidentications, and closer to home) and progressing to super hard (including rare species and those frequently misidentified and those from further away (and even perhaps less clear or focussed pictures)).
But it is great fun. WIsh I had lots more time to play with it. it is really super cool in honing one’s rapid response skills.
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This might be related to the bug reported where “iconic_taxon_name” remains that of the first ID made, even when it is withdrawn. It will likely “fix itself” when iNat fix that bug…
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/reviewed-on-download-differs-from-inat/10783
That’s an awesome idea. Thanks!
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Hmmm, that does make a lot of sense!
I didn’t anticipate this warm of a reception to my project. Thank you to each of you who tried it out and gave feedback. Here’s are the improvements I’ve been able to make as a result:
Changes Made:
- Added a score board so that you can compare your score with others (@squiresk)
- Moved the prompt above the images (thanks @tiwane @kaipatiki_naturewatc @ourmikegeorge )
- Added Scientific names (@Ajott, @alexis_orion @pdfuenteb @robotpie )
- Spread taxa more evenly (no more moth-only Quizzes @fffffffff @huronia )
- Only showing research-grade and native taxa (@fffffffff)
- Made questions more difficult by grouping related taxa more often
- A few bug fixes
Still to come:
- The ability to quiz yourself on more specific kinds of taxa (e.g. fish, flowers, mushrooms etc.)
- The ability to cycle through multiple images of taxa instead to having the rely on just the default photo
- Further improvements to the taxa sorting (for better quality questions)
- The ability to repeat a quiz without seeing mostly the same taxa
- Different question formats (e.g. one image and 4 names)
- The choice to see scientific names, common names, or both
A couple of notes:
-
It seems like there’s not much I can do about the username case sensitivity. I can force the input to be lowercase, but then if someone has a username with capitals, then they won’t be found. What I’ve done instead is make is that whenever a user name isn’t found, a message appears asking them to double check the casing
-
The scoreboard just went live, so there are no scores in it yet, feel free to help fill it up so people can see how they compare.
Thanks again everyone. Hopefully this can help someone learn about wildlife while staying indoors. This thread and my PMs are open for additional feedback and suggestions.
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Absolutely brilliant!
Just ran through it twice, and this one came up both times:
Also, and a small thing… it seems to pick up a vernacular that is not what I normally see in iNat, probably because I have a portal setting of New Zealand. but also possibly because of taxa having location based vernaculars. Now that the scientific names are in there too it doesn’t really matter that much.
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Awesome, the changes are great!
I just did one quiz where it gave me one question, and in that one question there was only one photo to click on…
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this happens every time I select “location: Berlin, Germany” and fungi.
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Thanks for the extra details, this helps alot. From a quick test It looks like there are only 18 Fungi that have observations (native and Research Grade) in that area, and out of the questions that my app generates from these 18, all but one get filtered out for some reason. I’ll look into it and get this fixed.
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does “only native taxa” mean that if a taxon doesn’t have any native/introduced status selected it won’t get included? I feel like that would limit the taxa quite a bit…
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I never thought about that. I’m still learning about how this site works. I figured adding that parameter would prevent species that don’t make sense in a particular location appearing in the list of taxa (e.g. pets or zoo animals).
Would filtering for ‘research grade’ be enough to achieve this?
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Yes. All observations of non-wild organisms should be marked an captive, which makes the observation “casual”. if you are filtering only for research grade, that automatically excludes species that only have observations that are casual or needs ID.
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Got it - that makes things much easier, thank you. I made the change and deployed it, so your Berlin Fungi Quiz should have more taxa now 
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Thanks a lot, I got through all 10 questions now :)
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Love it! My wife and I are self-quarantined for a week, so this quiz is a fun way to pass the time. Thanks!
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Great fun, thank you.
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being able to see user photos is good, but it takes a while to load each time which makes it very hard to answer quickly - maybe make it possible to opt out? or load the whole quiz before, but still have the possibility to change photos?
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Genius! Would love to know how you made this. Such an idea would go down very well within my local Natural History Society, for which I’ve just taken over managing the website.
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You’re right, I just added the option to cycle through multiple photos. This does make questions load more slowly, so I will add the option to opt out, and I will experiment with ways to load questions ahead of time.
Keep in mind though, the speed multiplier only starts to decrease once all pictures have loaded so right now you should still be rewarded the same way for answering quickly. I got rid of the multiplier indicator because I thought it made the screen too cluttered, but maybe I’ll bring it back and make it smaller and more out of the way.
Thanks Alexis