Ham Academy is a Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) based Javascript program that assists teaching the Amateur Radio theory using the VEC questions pools. Ham Academy uses on-line interactive sessions for reviewing the questions pools.

Students first register their name (which is used as a file name for storing session statistics). A session is begun by selecting the question pool and then the subset of pool questions to be used in the interactive session. The questions pools have been updated to the latest set from the ARRL web site.

During a session the selected questions are displayed and the student chooses from the four possible answers - A thru D. HA keeps statistics on the correct and missed questions. At the end of the session the student can repeat the session using only the missed questions. This selective repetition helps the student with weak areas in learning the material.

At any time during a session, the student can suspend it and exit from the program. Later, the session can be resumed and testing continued. The session statistics are stored in the browser "cookie" file for up to one year.

I'd like to make a special plea for feedback from anyone using the program. Your help is needed to find problems. And your ideas on how to improve HA would be appreciated. Please help out if you can.

Ken Behrens, KB0YLN, reported a rather annoying problem that the SUSPEND option was not working with the Firefox browser. He persevered thru our initial disbelief and provided detailed data that reproduced the error. It turned out to be a difference in Firefox's handling of timing for events. Our appreciation for his help in making HA a free tool to the amateur community.

Corrected "minor" corruption of Extra question pool and missing section E0.

The question pools for all license classes have been updated and are now valid as shown in the table below.

• Technician - July 1, 2006 to Jun 30, 2010
• General     - July 1, 2007 to Jun 30, 2011
• Extra         - July 1, 2008 to Jun 30, 2012

The question pools for all license classes have been updated and are now valid as shown in the table below. This includes deletion of questions for FCC changes related to the refarming of Novice subbands and the dropping of all Morse code requirements (Element 1). The pools are up-to-date as of December 15^th, 2006.

• Technician - July 1, 2006 to Jun 30, 2010
• General     - July 1, 2007 to Jun 30, 2011
• Extra         - July 1, 2002 to Jun 30, 2008

There have been quite a few requests to have a download version of HA. The program is entirely written in Javascript and intended to be run over Internet so I've been reluctant to do that. The program is designed to load the files, graphics, and html pages before starting. So it can be started over Internet and with the telephone connection broken continue to operate.

But on reflection, I've decided that there are cases where executing it off-line really makes sense. So now you can download all the files in ZIP format and extract them to a single folder, e.g. C:/HA. HA can then be executed from HDD using a browser. Click on FILE, then OPEN index.html from the folder it was saved to (e.g. C:\HA\index.html), and HA will execute off-line.

By Joe Speroni
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