Instructional 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.

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.

Learning to Spend Money the Yummy Way

November 17, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 12 Comments

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This week’s Articulate challenge is to create a learning game for kids. What’s not to like about this one?

Grandma’s Got Some Money

The Idea

The only problem was coming up with an idea. I messed around with math and word games, then starting building a camping game, but wasn’t happy with any of it.

I finally realized that unless the game emulated a situation where a kid really needed to apply some knowledge, I wasn’t going to like it and neither would the kid. This scenario reminds me of my wonderful brother Bryan who was always finding treasures and wondering if he had enough money to buy them, but it applies to any kid – large or small.

Flat, Mobile-Friendly, Kid-Friendly Design

The Interaction

The Intro: I wanted to ease you into the situation rather than unceremoniously drop you at a cupcake shop. Grandma supplies the money and the mission. The rest is up to you.

The Design: I kept the design pretty flat. I also wanted it to be playable on a tablet, so kept it simple and clean. Using a drag-and-drop, avoiding hover states, and keeping images large enough to easily tap and move with fingers were also part of my mobile-friendly plan.

The Challenge: I didn’t want there to be an on-screen calculator that showed how much money would be left after each cupcake was chosen. Those don’t exist in real cupcake shops, so why supply one here?

My Wish List: What I would love to do is supply feedback that goes over the math of what they just spent and ask them how much change they have left. I’d also love to make it so that if they chose to spend a smaller amount – buying just one cupcake, for example – they could save that money and take it with them to the next challenge. I’d want them to go to the movies, a fast food restaurant, an arcade, etc., and be met with different challenges in each location.

Too Much to Mention: There’s lots more that went into this one – from the variables and conditional triggers to the images, fonts, and pictograms – but if I go into all that we’d just be burning daylight, and you need to go buy some cupcakes! (But feel free to ask me questions.)

Go Buy Cupcakes!

Have fun spending Grandma’s money on a little cake and frosting right here.

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Preventing Workplace Violence Holiday-Style!

November 4, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 12 Comments

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Our Protagonist

This week David Anderson challenged us to create a scenario about preventing workplace violence.

The Idea

Addressing the topic of violence comes to me about as naturally as learning Hungarian, so I put this challenge aside for awhile.

While organizing files a bit later, I stumbled across these cute-as-a-button holiday images and decided to challenge myself to use them – exactly as they are – for the challenge. The snowman and gingerbread man would be my characters, and I wouldn’t let myself manipulate or change them.

The Scene of the Crime

The Scenario

Since Christmas trees were part of this set, I opted to have the snowman run a Christmas tree lot and have the gingerbread man pull a heist. The only weapon-like image I had was a hatchet, so it became a hatchet job.

You Make the Decisions

You, as the learner, choose how to respond. In both the positive and negative outcomes you’re given tips to help you successfully cope with the situation before trying it again with different choices, giving you a safe and effective way to learn and practice the concepts.

Try it Out!

Do you know how to handle tough times on a Christmas tree lot? Try it right here and find out! You might even have a little gingerbread-themed fun while you’re at it.

10 Treats (and Tricks!) I Hear as an Instructional Designer

October 28, 2014 By Jackie Van Nice 6 Comments

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This week’s Articulate challenge is to list 10 things instructional designers don’t like to hear.

IDs with jobs will always have issues to resolve – (let’s hear it for gainful employment!) – and I’m grateful every day that I get to do this work.

Yummy ID Goodness

But there’s very little that comes my way that I don’t like to hear, and most of it is completely positive and makes me giddily happy. So I wrapped up some of the tastiest treats I hear (along with a couple of minor tricks) just in time for Halloween. I also put them into a quick interaction in Storyline that you can see here.

Scarily True

Each of these is real, all of them have come from my clients, and every one of them is completely sincere. I’ve also added some comments below under each one.