When making questions for your quiz bank and questions in general you might decide that you want to include a sketch or a drawing or something like that to maybe give the students a hint or maybe the questions requires a sketch. When teaching welding it is pretty difficult to ask questions about welding symbols and blueprint reading without a small drawing or a sketch.
Now that we realize that at some point you are probably going to need a sketch or two for your class, I am going to list the four main pieces of software that I use to add a little depth and or clarity to my quiz questions.
1) Google Drawings
2) Libre Office - Draw
3) Snipping Tool - on Windows 10
4) Microsoft Paint - on Windows 10
All of the above pieces of software are either free or open source.
Google Drawings
Google Drawings is a diagramming software included as part of the free, web-based Google Docs Editors suite offered by Google. It allows importing images from the computer or from the Web as well as inserting shapes, arrows, scribbles and text from predefined templates. Objects can be moved, resized and rotated. The software also allows for basic editing of images, including cropping, applying masks and adding borders. Images can also be published online as images or downloaded in standard formats such as JPEG, SVG, PNG, or PDF. ~ Wikipedia
My main use of Google drawing is for making welding symbols. Below is a sample question.
Q#1 - What is the meaning of the welding symbol shown below?
*a. fillet weld, arrow side
b. fillet weld, other side
c. double bevel groove weld, arrow side
d. single bevel groove weld, arrow side
As you can see from the sketch above to make welding symbol questions you just need a few arrows and a couple of lines and you are off to the races.
Libre Office - Draw
LibreOffice Draw is a free and open source vector graphics editor. It is one of the applications included in the LibreOffice office suite, developed by The Document Foundation. LibreOffice Draw can be used to create complicated figures using shape tools, straight and curved tools, polygon tools, among other features. Like the other components of LibreOffice, Draw can be run on Linux, MacOS and Microsoft Windows. ~ Wikipedia
Q#2 - What is the dimension A? Look at the orthographic drawings and figure out Dimension A.
a. 1.3"
b. 2"c. 3"
d. 3.3"
e. Can't be determined - not enough information.
LibreOffice Draw has more features and is a little bit more powerful than Google Drawings. Not that I couldn't have put together a similar sketch with Google Drawings but to me it just seems a little bit easier to do it with LibreOffice Draw. I will usually export the drawings as a PDF file and then take a snip of the PDF file and then save it as a JPG file so that I can import it into the question I am building.
Snipping Tool - on Windows 10
Snipping Tool is a Microsoft Windows screenshot utility included in Windows Vista and later. It can take still screenshots of an open window, rectangular areas, a free-form area, or the entire screen. Snips can then be annotated using a mouse or a tablet, stored as an image file (PNG, GIF, or JPEG file) or an MHTML file, or e-mailed. Snipping Tool allows for basic image editing of the snapshot, with different colored pens, an eraser, and a highlighter.
The snipping tool is pretty easy to use, I am not going to put together a tutorial on how to use the snipping tool. There are well put together tutorials on the internet that cover the material pretty well. Suffice it to say that this is a pretty good tool for acquiring pictures photos and sketches from various sources on the internet. I use this tool when I am poaching sketches and pictures from the various US military manuals, DOT materials, and other non copyrighted materials.
Paint - on Windows 10
Microsoft Paint (Paintbrush, for MacOS users) is a simple raster graphics editor that has been included with all versions of Microsoft Windows. The program opens and saves files in Windows bitmap (BMP), JPEG, GIF, PNG, and single-page TIFF formats. The program can be in color mode or two-color black-and-white, but there is no grayscale mode. For its simplicity and that it is included with Windows, it rapidly became one of the most used applications in the early versions of Windows, introducing many to painting on a computer for the first time. It is still widely used for simple image manipulation tasks.
The picture above is a screen shot of Microsoft Paint.
Q#3 - What part of a typical welding gun is the white arrow pointing to in the picture?
As you can see in the picture above, I modified the original picture with Microsoft Paint by adding the white arrow so that I could ask a question about what the photo.
Microsoft Paint is not as powerful as OpenOffice Draw and Google Drawings but it does have its uses. My main use of Microsoft Paint for cleaning up JPEG, GIF and PNG files. Or if I need to add some text to an already existing sketch or maybe add a red circle or point something out on a drawing or sketch that I already have and I don't want to redo the whole thing.
Those are the four main software tools that I use for making sketches and drawings for my quiz questions and for the question bank.
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