Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #52 – Using Interactive Sliders in E-Learning. The brief: This week your challenge is to show creative ways to use sliders in online learning. You can focus your slider on functionality or visual design.

I enjoy watching cooking competition shows on TV like MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules. Often on these programs the contestants are given the same ‘core’ ingredient and they need to create a meal that hightlights this ingredient. In a way, this is similar to the weekly challenges in that you create a demo based on a core theme or Storyline feature.

On the shows there’s always at least one or two people who don’t achieve desired outcome or as they say on TV ‘fail to make the core ingredient shine’. In other words, the core ingredient doesn’t stand out and gets lost among all the other ingredients in the dish. On reflection, this happened to me with this challenge and I’ll show you what I mean.

In this challenge the ‘core ingredient’ were sliders (not the tasty little burgers) a new feature for adding interactivity in Storyline 2:

In an eLearning project, a slider allows learners to reveal information, pictures etc. as the thumb is dragged along the track. When a slider is inserted into a project, you can customise it for your needs via the ‘Slider Tools’ tab:

In the above example, the slider is divided into 10 ‘steps’ which are the number of movements the thumb makes along the track.

I was struggling for an idea for my demo but I happened to see a tweet where a guy called Nick Barclay had recreated movie posters using circles and colour. So I thought that I could do something where movies were represented with colour and as you drag the thumb the colour changed. Then you need to guess the name of the movie.

I came up with four movies and I used state changes to change the colour of a rectangle as you drag the thumb along the track. I added triggers for each step on the slider:

Then, because the demo was about movies I thought it needed to be themed and set in a cinema. So I found an image of a movie screen, resized the rectangle to fit the screen, made the track transparent and changed the thumb to a popcorn image:

Then, because there were four movies it needed a ‘home’ screen to start from. Plus this would allow people to choose the order in which they completed the demo. I added a screen with four movie poster frames and some instructions and each movie branches from the home screen. Here’s how it looks in Storyline:

Each time you go into a ‘theatre’ you come back to the home screen until all four are completed. After each cinema was visited, I used a change of state on each movie poster along with some true/false variables to darken the colour of the poster which indicates that it has been completed.

Then, because I wanted people to enter their guesses for each movie into the demo I needed something that allowed for this, so I used a text entry variable. These are cool because you can type information into one part of a module and it can be used in another part (and this can be done more than once if needed). I jazzed it up so that it fitted in with the overall theme:

Then, if people were typing in their guesses, they needed to see if they were correct so I needed another screen that showed their answer (using the text variable again) compared to the correct response. I came up with the idea that you were playing for ‘free movie tickets’ for each correct response and I found a ticket image and duplicated it four times:

Then, to tie it all together I added some intro and closing screens along with some music to help set the scene!

Can you see what happened?

I started out using sliders but kept adding a little bit more, then a bit more and by the time the demo was finished I had variables, changes of state, branching and some sliders in there too. At the time, I was satisfied with how it had turned out but I didn’t realise how diluted the sliders demo had become until a few days after I finished it and I went back and looked at some other entries. By adding more and more to the demo, I’d lost sight as to what it was supposed to be about in the first place. So while I didn’t really make the slider interaction shine, I did learn a valuable lesson and that is to stay focused on the reason why you’re creating something in the first place.

I still think it’s a good demo but unfortunately it doesn’t really meet the brief and showcase the use of sliders. To see for yourself, click on the below image to view the demo:

Let me know what you think. You can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.