Storyline Styles

Popular Choice

***All template files are tested using modern browsers, such as Chrome and Firefox. We do not support or test using Internet Explorer.***

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If the Storyline Layout file is the simplest of our templates in a family, this might be the most complicated.

The Popular Choice Game is a Feud-style game, where a single question is answered, and the user has a set amount of time to provide the most common—or popular—responses to that question. For instance, "What type of food do you eat with your fingers?" The user might respond chicken, or sandwiches. That's a bit of an unserious example to be sure. But, imagine, instead, a process-oriented question, where users needed to recall the steps in a given sequence, or something similar.

The mechanics and gaming elements make this template a workhorse, in my opinion. You can apply it to any number of scenarios with some pretty simple restyling. Let's dive into how to do just that now.

The game has three slides: an introduction, a question slide, and a results slide. As it's currently built, you can add questions by duplicating the question slide and adjusting the global variable, NumberOfQuestions_ to the number of questions you'd like to include. All elements on each of those slides are editable. To change text or text color, select and edit away; to adjust shapes, simply click and format. There are a very few small exceptions to this rule about shapes, but we'll clear that up in a moment.

The bulk of what you'd want to edit, of course, would be on the Question slide, so we'll focus there for the duration. The base layer contains a few objects to hold our triggers, some design elements like the header, and a submit button. The slide master for this slide holds the rest of what you see.

The first layer in the stack sets the parameters for the question: answers, answer numbers, and timer value.

Next, the Question layer contains the text of the question you're asking the user. Answer 1 – Answer 8 Correct all behave the same. They each have a single feedback label that has a color field and Answer# variable with an icon and points label at right. To edit the main label, grab it and edit as desired—it's a standard SL shape.

To edit the icon or points label, grab the main label, and edit its states. The icon is a custom shape and can be styled as you like. The points label is also a standard textbox.

The FAIL layer includes feedback textboxes, a Next button shape, and 8 feedback labels. Edit the textboxes and button as any standard shape; edit the incorrect labels in the manner described previously, for the AnswerCorrect layers.

Finally, we have the Success and Pop-Up layers. Success appears when the user gets the question entirely correct. To edit what's displayed here, grab the textbox you'd like to change or style, and go for it. Same with the pop-up layer. This is a warning layer that shows up if the user has entered a duplicate response. Style this text box however you'd like.

So, on to the slightly-more complicated stuff: what makes this thing tick? Well, the short answer is: a bunch of JavaScript.

There are a LOT of triggers in this file, and the ones that run the show, are the JavaScript. JavaScript runs the game logic and answer checking, and also sends statements to your LRS via xAPI if you so desire.

Check out our general xAPI videos for more information on that but, when editing this file, pay special attention to those triggers, and how they're ordered—if any of the JS triggers are moved or lost, it could cause the file to break, so be wary.

With just that bit of info, you can completely customize and update this file as you see fit, then export it to send xAPI data capturing each individual user response and leaving you looking like an eLearning Rockstar.