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This week’s Articulate challenge, with a nod to the latest National Spelling Bee, is to build an interactive vocabulary quiz. It’s a great challenge because you can take it in so many directions.
Inspiration
Intro Screen
I looked at a lot of interaction types, but when nothing struck me I thought I could at least start by choosing characters to work with. That’s when I remembered I’ve got good stock images of children. When I started looking at extremes (who’s the youngest?) then thought about an opponent (who’s the most unlikely?) I suddenly had my theme.
Content
Going for ridiculous words and context sentences was the only way to do it, and the greater the contrast between the participant prompts, the better. Unfortunately, I have far more knowledge of goofball cop humor than little girl references, so I just had to wing it on the kid side.
Quiz Slide in Action
Design
I focused on designing a quick, clean interaction because it’s funnier. I’m pretty happy with it, given the time frame.
Building It
I always have to go back to refresh my memory about how to engineer these things:
- Each question slide is actually a fill-in-the-blank graded quiz slide.
- To capture the running game scores I created variables for KidTotal and CopTotal.
- To add points to their scores, on the “correct” feedback layer I added a trigger that adds a value of 1 to the appropriate KidTotal or CopTotal variable at the beginning of the timeline.
- To display their scores, I inserted reference fields on the scoreboards to show the current value of KidTotal and CopTotal.
- I also created variables to take you to one of three possible endings based on the final score.
- I couldn’t get the text entry screens to refresh after hitting Replay. Those kept holding on to whatever was entered in the prior round. I ended up adding a hidden results slide to create the needed variables so I could add a “reset results” trigger to the Replay button. That worked.
The Result
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I think it’s funny. My clue is when I can’t stop laughing long enough to record audio, but it was pretty late at night, so maybe I was just punchy.
Fantastic job Jackie. I love the way you turned the tables on the two characters giving the cop all the kid slang and vice versa. It reminded me a little of the Ken the Boxer bit from Monty Python.
I think I have a vague recollection of Ken the Boxer. I’m not sure he followed Queensberry rules, if I’m thinking of the same guy. We tried to maintain a bit more decorum on this set.
Thanks for your comments, Dan. I’m glad you like it!
OH boy, you got my kid’s attention with this one. You can’t say “Merida” and “Fluttershy” and “Word Girl” around this house without driving my kid nuts. It’s like playing dog bark .wav files around a terrier.
LOL…I’ll take that as a victory considering how little I know about girl world these days. In fact, she can take vicarious credit for Fluttershy since your past mentions of Rainbow Dash got me googling and wikipedia-ing to see what that was and if it could lead to something I could use for this one. (I chose Fluttershy because it was one of the few one-word names.) I figured a Disney princess would work, so more googling, and I already had a general idea about Word Girl.
If I do another one like this I’ll have to see what her consulting rate is.
This is a funny and well put together e-learning. Thank you for sharing.
My pleasure, Sheila! I’m glad you like it. Still makes me laugh, too.
Jackie, this one makes me laugh too. All that’s missing is “amazeballs”. Where did you get the great images of the little girl.
I’m so glad you like it, Linda! This one always makes me laugh too.
“Amazeballs” is a good one. We’ll use it for the rematch! Character images are from eLearningArt.com. She’s one cute kid!