Welcome!
P-A Countdown takes ordinary multiple-choice questions and turns them into a fun and engaging classroom activity.
There are three ways to sign in and create games for your students:
- Demo user. You can access about 75 free games for math, science and social studies. Just sign in with “demo” for both User ID and Password.
- Registered user. If your school subscribes to Problem-Attic, then you can turn your documents into games—you can select the questions that students will see! Click the Start Here button for details.
- Developer. Countdown uses the new Problem-Attic API. If you’re a software developer and would like access to 165,000+ questions, please write to support@problem-attic.com for the API specs.
First time? School subscription?
— or —
Sign in as a registered user or guest.
How the Sign-Up Process Works
If you are a teacher at a school which subscribes to Problem-Attic, then you can turn any of your documents into a Countdown game. It’s very easy and requires only that you sign up for Countdown with the same email as you use for Problem-Attic.
Why a separate sign-up? Countdown is not actually part of Problem-Attic. It runs on a separate server and connects through what’s called an “API”. Countdown is designed, in part, to show how other programs can make use of Problem-Attic’s database—not just for games but soon, we hope, adaptive learning systems, interactive lessons, e-textbooks, etc.
Countdown cannot access your documents without your explicit permission. After you enter your email and password and press the Continue button, you’ll be asked to log in to Problem-Attic (if not logged in already) and authorize Countdown to connect to your account. You need to do this only once, and you can revoke your authorization at any time through your account settings in Problem-Attic.
Sign Up to Create Your Own Games
After pressing Continue, you’ll be sent to Problem-Attic and asked if it’s okay for Countdown to access your documents. Then you’ll return here.
If you forgot your password, you can easily reset it. Close this box, then click the button labeled “Start Here” and go through the sign-up process again.
If you are a teacher, you will be asked to authorize Countdown to access your documents in Problem-Attic. If you are a developer, you will need to enter your API access token.
- Countdown uses the same user ID as Problem-Attic to simplify the sign-up process. (Countdown doesn’t do its own emailing.) As a best practice you should have a different password for each program, but that is not required. If you forget your Countdown password, you can just go through the signup process again and reset it.
- Countdown is truly a separate program and has its own Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Still its rules about copyrights and use of questions are the same. Any games you make in Countdown should be for your own students, just like the documents you make in Problem-Attic.
- A program that connects to Problem-Attic through the API can never modify your documents, nor can it access the scoring app or any student results. The API allows a program only to copy a document you’ve made (i.e., get the questions you’ve selected) and only with your permission.
- The sign-up process is for school subscribers. You cannot access your documents in Problem-Attic as a single-user subscriber unless you are software developer who is authorized to use API. Please write to support@problem-attic.com to learn more about the API.