Drag & Drop

Getting Emoji-nal: Teaching Vocabulary

April 3, 2015 By Jackie Van Nice 6 Comments

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This week’s Articulate ELH Challenge is to create an interaction using emojis – or basically to use simple graphics in place of text.

The Idea: Vocabulary Practice

Anyone who has learned or taught languages knows pictures are indispensable for vocabulary practice, so I thought I’d create one with emojis.

I wanted it to be in Turkish, partly because it would be way cool and partly because I need the practice, but to save time I stuck with English.

The Design: Simple

I kept it emoji-simple. From layout to images to instructions it’s easy to figure out, easy to navigate, and easy to understand the teaching points.

It’s technically a drag-and-drop I made into a free practice activity. The feedback – even for incorrect answers – is designed to help you learn vocabulary, so I didn’t see the point of keeping score. Sometimes it’s just nice to play.

So Much More

There’s a ton more you could do with the concept, including adapting it to work on listening skills or writing skills rather than reading skills. Maybe I’ll get the chance to adapt it in other challenges down the road!

Give It A Try!

Ready to test your vocabulary skills? You can check out this emoji-nal little demo right here.

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Drag and Drop Activities: Not Just for Cowboys Anymore

January 9, 2015 By Jackie Van Nice 10 Comments

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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

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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!

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Can You Motivate This Monster?

June 29, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 4 Comments

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This week’s Articulate challenge is to create a quiz about an instructional design concept. I decided to create a quiz about Dr. John Keller’s ARCS motivational design model.

The Idea

As I brainstormed (heh-heh) how the heck to do it, I thought of the most basic concept of motivation, which is to spur the learner on: Provide him with a jolt of electricity, if you will.

The next thing I knew, Boris Karloff was staring at me as I carefully wired him up to car batteries. You just never know where a challenge will take you.

The Interaction

The idea is that you choose an appropriate design option for each of the four areas: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. I made them appropriate to this learner, pulling more from Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein than Mary Shelley’s classic novel, but it’s all about keeping me entertained.

Feedback Screen

You get feedback whether your answers are correct (motivated monster), or incorrect (unmotivated monster). I included some quick tips in the player with a mini outline of the ARCS model to help explain and/or lead you to the correct answers, too.

So Much More

I’d love to go over the many other scenes and ideas I had for this one, but at some point I have to call it a quick demo and stop.

I’ll also mention that my AA battery > car battery > single battery cable > neck bolt electrical circuit entertains me no end. I think that’s part of what makes these challenges so fun. You do a quick mock-up and it leads to the funniest improvisations.

Try It!

If you’d like to try using the ARCS model to motivate Frank, the interaction is right here.

Dragging & Dropping Your Seat Mate

February 5, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 8 Comments

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I enjoy a good drag-and-drop interaction, clients love them, and they do perk things up – but I only occasionally use them. So when Articulate’s David Anderson published this week’s E-Learning Challenge to create a custom non-quiz drag-and-drop interaction, it inspired me to try one for fun. I don’t know if my example is exactly what David had in mind (I tried!), but it’s what I was inspired to create.

The Idea

I immediately thought of airplane travel and that moment you’re in your seat watching others come down the aisle towards you as you think “Is that the person I’ll be spending the next 12 hours with, or maybe that one?” Which led me to a drag-and-drop interaction where you get to choose your seat companion based on that same lack of information, and then suffer (or enjoy) the consequences.

The interaction could easily be adapted to a real course – maybe as a predictive exercise. You could have learners choose people to perform a particular job based on whether or not they look like they have the right safety gear on, for example – then see what happens!

Your Choices

Building It

I built it in Storyline, but didn’t use its built-in drag-and-drop options. I just created custom triggers and used ancillary slides to show the results of each choice.

Interestingly, my biggest sticking point in construction was getting any of it to function properly as long as my drop target wasn’t visible. (You drop fellow passengers into the airplane seat next to you, but in order to isolate that drop area I used an invisible shape on top of the seat image.)

It was only after I had the vaguest recollection of seeing a video from Jeanette Brooks where she made her drop target invisible by making the fill color transparent, as opposed to choosing no fill color, that I got the thing to work. Silly me.

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Enjoying the Consequences

I can’t help it. I just like this one – and you can see it right here!