This is the second and last part of my response to the Audrey Test (see my previous post).

I’m calling it the Becker Ed Tech Test (BETT) because I already have the Becker Lazy Test (BLT), which is something I developed some years ago as part of my 4-PEG game assessment.

Like Audrey’s Test, mine is longer than the Joel Test. Note also that this is obviously not a comprehensive list, and being able to answer all of these questions can’t guarantee that you are a well-rounded educational technologist.

It’s a pretty good start though.

So, can YOU pass the BETT?

Today’s installment gets right to the heart of the matter: the actual tech questions. Like yesterday’s, many of these don’t have somple right or wrong answers, but if you don’t know how to either:

1. formulate a sensible answer to these questions, OR
2. know how to find one out,

The I really think you should be careful about calling yourself an educational technologist – and don’t use the words “geek” or “nerd” to describe yourself. You are neither.

25 General Tech Questions

1. How does one move a website from one service provider to another?
2. How is information stored in the cloud?
3. How does a URL get resolved? (http://blog.lunatech.com/2009/02/03/what-every-web-developer-must-know-about-url-encoding)
4. In what ways is it a challenge to create content for the web that will function correctly on all browsers and mobile devices?
5. How do multi-player games work? (http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/what-every-programmer-needs-to-know-about-game-networking/)
6. Do you know enough about HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript that you can edit a web page at the code level?
7. What is the difference between iteration and recursion? (Warning: this is a tricky one. Many of the people I’ve talked to in Ed Tech who claimed to know the difference were wrong.)
8. What is a structured walkthrough?
9. Name three programming paradigms other than object orientation.
10. What was the original purpose for the language Pascal?
11. How are computer games different from computer simulations?
12. What’s the difference between Java and Javascript?
13. What is the most expensive part of a computer game with respect to computer resources?
14. What’s the difference between an application and a program?
15. Why is the ASCII table organized the way it is? How is UNICODE different from ASCII?
16. How are dates represented inside the computer? What does this have to do with the Y2K problem?
17. How are real and integer numbers represented?
18. How does the floating point number format affect numeric accuracy? What is the rounding error?
19. What are strings and how do they differ from integers and reals?
20. What kind of information is stored in the header of a graphics file?
21. What distinguishes lossy from lossless compression?
22. What is a state machine?
23. How is a meta-language related to programming languages?
24. What’s the difference between Java and Javascript?
25. What’s the difference between a relative and absolute address?

Clearly there are many additional questions that are also important. Have any you think should be added?

Let me know!

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