E-Learning Design

Make it a Game: Climb Heroes Mountain!

December 31, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 17 Comments

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When people are new to the Articulate E-Learning Heroes community I like to point out a few things on the site to help them get going. Even if you know something exists – the weekly challenges, for example – you might not know how to find it.

Make a Game of It!

I thought it’d be fun to create a game that gets newbies to explore the site and points out some of the best tools around to help them succeed in their jobs. I’m entering it into David Anderson’s gaming challenge where I already have one cold, foamy, refreshing entry – but can you ever have enough games?

Some Nifty Features

Here are some elements I used that you could include in any game or interaction to make it more fun, effective, and appealing.

Images That Looks Just Like the Site’s

A fully-realized and consistent theme: Since the topic is the ELH site, I tapped into its visual style and themes to create my own. I used the mountain on the ELH Discussions page and the happy campers in front of it to establish my camping and mountain-climbing theme. I also created pictogram images that mimic the look and feel of the site’s own images.
A game goal: The goal is to climb Heroes Mountain by taking on a series of challenges. Each challenge involves navigating the ELH site to find something of value.
Real-World Challenges & Motivation

Real-world motivation: Aligning your learner’s motivation with the game’s goals makes it involving from the start. My game character is new to e-learning and needs help in her job, just like lots of newcomers. What better motivation to learn about the helpful features of ELH?
Real-world decision making: In the game, you search for things on the site just like you would in real life. The only difference is feedback. If you’re headed in the right direction, feedback is delayed until you arrive at your goal. If you’re headed in the wrong direction, you learn more about the site and get a prompt to remind you of your goal.

Game Progress: Badges!

Game Progress: Some Mountain Climbing

Giving rewards and showing progress: After you meet each challenge, you earn a themed badge and your virtual stand-in climbs a little higher up the mountain. Seeing a goal and your progress towards it is always good motivation to keep going.
A satisfying result: Not only is there a “win” at the top of Heroes Mountain, but the game’s character also wins since meeting the challenges on the ELH site helped her become more successful in her job.

Ready to Make Your Own?

If you’d like to make your own game (and find lots of inspiring examples!) check out these game-specific ELH challenges: Create a Simple E-Learning Game, Steal This E-Learning Template, and E-Learning Games for Kids. Plus you can find lots of free templates to get started on the ELH site!

Happy new year – and happy climbing! You can make your way up Heroes Mountain right here.

What’s Your Favorite #ELHChallenge?

December 30, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 12 Comments

In the wake of David Anderson sharing his current count of #ELHChallenges by entrant, Kimberly Bourque asked “What’s your favorite challenge?” But how do you pick a favorite – and a favorite what? Favorite challenge idea? Favorite week of entries? Favorite design of your own? Though nearly impossible to choose, I’ve tried.

My 3 Favorite Challenges From David

I’ve learned something every single week from every single challenge, but these stand out for me.

#11: Design a Comic Book Theme. I loved this because unless David had made it a challenge I’d never have tried it. I ended up convinced that this style needs to be used far more often.

#39: Education Podcasts in Online Training. This was a great change of pace from the standard demo, and a true challenge since most of us had never created a podcast before.

#41: Hand Drawn E-Learning Courses. Again, this was an unusual challenge format that demanded a lot of creativity and I liked that we had to think in a very different way.

My 3 Favorite Challenges Where I Loved The Entries

Every week is a good week to see what everyone’s been up to, but these I found especially entertaining.

#41: Hand Drawn E-Learning Courses. I think the fact that this challenge required so much ingenuity made these entries truly fascinating.

#39: Education Podcasts in Online Training. How could you not love hearing your fellow challengees come to life before your very ears? The individuality and energy of it was great.

#32: Death, Taxes, and E-Learning Mistakes. For obvious reasons, checking out everyone’s chosen examples of bad e-learning was both fun and painful – but mostly fun.

3 Favorite Entries of My Own

This really is like choosing your favorite child – but here are three I love.

#63: Is Marsala a Good Color for George Washington? This one is so stupid I’m completely in love with it. Love the way it looks, the way it met the challenge, and the comments it elicited from readers.

#39: Dapper Dans & Pictograms. These guys make me so happy – plus I thought there was a lot of value to the post. I’m also noticing that I apparently like entries where I line up 4 guys in a row.

#37: Cop vs. Kid Spelling Bee. In the end, this one feels so wrong it just becomes right. It’s also the most trouble I’ve had producing challenge audio without laughing.

So what are your favorite #ELHChallenges?

Is Marsala a Good Color for George Washington?

December 22, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 11 Comments

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This week’s Articulate challenge is to use marsala – Pantone’s color of the year – as the primary color in a template or interaction. (Is it my fault that was the only guidance we got?)

The Idea

First, marsala just looks like lipstick to me. I don’t get “cocoa” or “wine” or anything else from it. So I googled lipstick history to see if I could find something to play with.

That’s when I discovered that at least one prominent gentleman in our nation’s history used to wear it. Naturally I wondered what he’d look like in marsala, and the rest is – of course – history.

The Colors

In addition to marsala I used three colors inspired by the Pantone color pairings David Anderson supplied, but I made up new names for them. “Cherry tree” is my favorite, but I’m equally proud of “venison” and “war”.

Enjoy!

I hope you like it. This may be my favorite challenge entry so far. I’m also pretty happy that I have an interaction ready to go for Presidents Day! If you haven’t already, you can check it out right here.

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The 12 Days of Data Presentation

December 21, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 10 Comments

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This week’s ELHChallenge is to present data using interactive charts and graphs. With just 4 days until Christmas, I succumbed to the theme.

What to Chart?

There are a million Christmas-related things you could present, but I kept it light and charted the gifts given in the song The 12 Days of Christmas. I’ve never paid much attention to the totals in it, so the sheer mass by the end was a little eye-opening.

How to Chart It?

I went for a simple slider that lets the user choose the day and see the resulting total for all gifts given to that point. I tried to provide enough visual interest and information to make the concept clear – but it does assume familiarity with the song.

The Gift of a New Challenge Year

I’m hopeful that none of us give or get quite this many gifts, but I’m looking forward to the gift of a whole new year’s worth of ELHChallenges – and I hope you are too!

Giving and Getting Free (and Beautiful!) Images

December 18, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 10 Comments

If you’re an Articulate E-Learning Hero who’s also a designer you need good images and appreciate the benefits of a community whose members share their work and expertise.

The morgueFile Community

You probably know morgueFile as a place to get free images, but I never knew their intention was to have a give-one-take-one sort of self-sustaining community. I thought their contributors were professional photographers and it never even occurred to me they’d want my contributions!

Since I’ve used some of their community’s photos to good effect for recent Articulate #ELHChallenge demos about digital magazines, freelancing tips, and ways to survive the holidays – I thought it would be fun to give back, too.

A Quick & Easy Way to Contribute

(Update: I’m no longer seeing the app or finding images I’ve contributed – but they’ve still got lots of images you can use!)

Last week I found out about their morgueFile #Quest app for iPhone*. Each day they issue a daily challenge (“red” for example), you snap a photo to answer it, upload it, and voilà! You’ve shared your work in a quick and easy way that helps both you and others.

Lucky for me I took a week of vacation right after discovering the app, so I had time to play with it and had oodles of fun taking pics and entering them into current and past challenges. You can see some of them on this page and get a glimpse of my vacay at the same time!

The Win-Win-Win-Win-Win

Not only do I find it more motivating to take pics with the app like this, but I get to be creative in a different way, I have more photos to use for my own projects, I have new sources of inspiration, and it makes me happy knowing that someone else might benefit from these little bits of color and light I’m sharing too.

If this sounds like fun, you might want to give it a try! They even have a Classroom where you can learn more about the basics of photography and how to take better pics, if that’s your goal.

*You don’t need the app to contribute to the site, of course! You can upload your contributions via any browser.