Safely using Geogebra applets in a test or exam

In some cases, you want to prevent users from accessing the internet via their browser during a test. Of course, users do need access to SOWISO, so you need to whitelist SOWISO’s URLs. This article explains which URLs that are exactly. If you don’t restrict internet access for students in a test or exam, then you don’t need to follow the procedures in this article.

To make sure that any Geogebra applets that are used in the test or exam with internet access restriction work properly, you need to whitelist the Geogebra website as well (which is explained in the same article). This does mean that students could visit the Geogebra website to cheat on their test. To prevent this, we provide two alternative ways to use Geogebra in tests and exams without having to whitelist the Geogebra website.

The first alternative is a very simple one can be used for static Geogebra applets, so for applets that are not moving, not depending on SOWISO variables and that the student cannot interact with. For these applets, we could make a screenshot of the applet and input this screenshot as an image in the exercise instead of the Geogebra applet. This article explains how to add images to an exercise.

The second alternative also works for dynamic Geogebra applets, so for applets that are moving, that depend on SOWISO variables or that the student should be able to interact with. Instead of using the online Geogebra version of the applet, we will download the applet into an offline .ggb file, upload that file to the exercise and then reinsert the applet in the exercise using the .ggb file.

Let’s say we have an example exercise with a Geogebra applet like this one:

To change this (online) Geogebra applet into an offline Geogebra applet, we need to follow these steps:

Edit the exercise (as explained in this article). If you cannot edit the exercise you probably don’t have rights to do so. In that case you need to make a copy of the exercise to another author group and edit the copy. Don’t forget to change the exercise in your test or exam to the copy of this exercise.
Left-click on the “GeoGebra” link and then choose “GeoGebra” to show the Geogebra menu

The menu will look something like this:
Copy the material id code (in the example it’s e6yb8p6m).
Go to the the applet on the Geogebra website. You can do this by going to https://www.geogebra.org/classic/e6yb8p6m where you replace the code after the last slash with the code that you just copied.
Click on the hamburger menu in the top right corner, select “Download” and then “GeoGebra file (.ggb)”. Save this file to your computer.
Now go back to the edit exercise page and go to the General tab. Scroll all the way down until you see “Upload”. Click on “+ Add files…” and select the .ggb file you just saved to your computer. Then press “Start” to upload the file.
Lastly, go back to the Texts tab of the exercise and open the Geogebra menu again. Delete the material id and choose the name of the file you just uploaded in the dropdown next to “filename”. Then click “Ok” and lastly “Save”.

You have now replaced the online Geogebra applet with an offline version, so the Geogebra website does not have to be whitelisted anymore in tests or exams for students to be able to see this applet properly.

Note that this method also works for Geogebra type exercises.