Jackie Van Nice

E-Learning Goodness by Jackie Van Nice

Articulate Storyline

Play to Find Your Valentine!

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Select Image to Launch Demo

This week’s challenge is to create an interaction for Valentine’s Day. What could be more fun than that?

The Idea

I had an elaborate story/game design in mind, but needed something I could knock out far more quickly. I kept coming back to the whimsical appeal of vintage valentines and eventually found one I could imagine using.

The Original Valentine

The Original Valentine

Valentine Roulette

The problem with the spinning valentine was figuring out how to engineer it. Lucky for me, generous community member Geert De Rycke shared his javascript-powered, randomized spinning wheel and I happened to find it. Woo-hoo!

So Who Are the Hidden Valentines?

Every time someone tweets out my Dapper Dan pictograms I always say “I love those guys!” – because I do – so that’s what got me started. Using characters from past challenge entries just seemed like way to go.

The Result

Feel free to take the wheel for a spin right here and see if you find a valentine you like! There’s an excellent chance that at least one of these choices will make you happy.

A Template Unification Plan (+ Free Template!)

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This week’s challenge is to take three disparate templates and create one peaceful template whose elements can coexist in harmony. An ambitious goal, but I was up for it.

The Existing Templates

I chose three Storyline 1 templates from the Downloads section of the ELH site: Nicole’s Click-and-Reveal template,  Tom’s Storyline Tabbed Notebook, and Tom’s Storyline Decision-Making Interaction. Why these?

  1. I could see them working well together as a main menu, detailed content holder, and a quiz.
  2. Their color schemes were roughly similar.
  3. Their (flat) image styles were similar.
  4. I knew that if I used them as I intended, I could stay true to their functionality.

The Before & After

Before: Nicole's Template

Before: Nicole’s Template

After: My Main Menu

After: My Main Menu

Here are captures of the original templates next to my made-over and unified template. How did I get them to peacefully coexist?

A Unified Course

As mentioned, one acts as a main menu, one as a content holder, and one as a quiz. Together they comprise the elements of a basic course.

Before: Tom's Submenu

Before: Tom’s Submenu

After: My Submenu

After: My Submenu

A Unified Theme

I began at the end with Tom’s shipping quiz. I then worked backwards to think of a general way to present info about shipping documents, then backwards to consider what kind of company would be training their people on shipping docs, then backwards to think of how they might start out the training.

Unified Fonts, Colors, and Images

I chose two of the existing fonts (Rockwell and Trebuchet), a simple color palette using a few of the existing colors, and stuck with the existing flat image style throughout. It helped that I made them all the same story size, too.

Before: Tom's Decision-Making Activity

Before: Tom’s Decision-Making Activity

After: My Quiz

After: My Quiz

See it! Download it! Try it Out!

Want to see some carefully-brokered template peace? See the demo here!

And download the free template here!

Where Infographics Meet Interactivity

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This Articulate challenge is to take an existing infographic and make it interactive.

The Infographic

I chose this one because of its simplicity and because I could picture how to make the Venn-diagrammatic intersections of each choice (Fast, Cheap, Great, and Free) interactive.

It also seemed relevant since we’re always discussing image quality and sourcing.

See the Similarity?

See the Similarity?

 3-D Chess, Anyone?

This infographic looks pretty easy to recreate, right? Well, not only were the colors and transparencies of the circles and intersections a challenge to imitate, but because of the interactivity I needed to have multiple images layered on top of one another in Storyline. It felt like I was building a 3-D chess board where the layers of color and transparency had to be kept in a delicate yet precarious balance. Quite the brain-bustery brain buster.

Engineering It

The Original

The Original

After the intro slide, everything is on one slide. There’s just one layer for “Try Again”, which means the rest of the interaction is completely controlled by states and conditional variables. Though not as thoroughly brain-busting as the visuals were, it was a good challenge.

I was really happy with my “Try Again” design, by the way. I loved that I got it to blend so nicely into the existing design, it gave me the chance to add some colors that helped balance the existing scheme, and I like the functionality of it.

Try it Out!

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Select Image to Launch Demo

Find out what kind of graphics you get where fast, cheap, great, and/or free intersect!

Drag and Drop Activities: Not Just for Cowboys Anymore

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This Articulate challenge is to come up with some creative ways to use drag-and-drop interactions. Designing them to present information and provide opportunities for practice broadens their usefulness and makes them more involving than a standard drag-and-drop quiz does.

The Topic

I had already been working on a course that included choosing proper safety gear for construction workers. In this demo I came up with the cowboy option for contrast – but you could use this approach for any two (or more) job functions that require different gear.

Hints Rather Than Answers

Select Image to Launch David Anderson's Demo

Select Image to Launch David Anderson’s Demo

Using David Anderson’s lovely table setting example for inspiration, I provided learner-controlled hints in addition to the ability to check your final answer and get feedback. You can also easily start over and try again. It’s another one of those activities that’s just sort of fun to play with.

Give it a Try!

Someone needs to outfit this guy. You should give it a try!

Select Image to Launch Demo

Select Image to Launch Demo