Hot Potatoes is an authoring tool developed by the University of Victoria in Canada that allows educators to create six types of interactive exercises for online learning, including short answers, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, crosswords, matching, and jumbled sentences. These exercises can be published on a website and accessed through any modern web browser, providing an engaging way for students to practice and reinforce learning concepts. The tool uses JavaScript to add interactivity to the exercises on web pages.