Learn. Show. Repeat.

Tag: States

4 Ideas for Combining Text and Images in eLearning

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #152 – Combining Text and Images in E-Learning. The brief: This week, your challenge is to share an example to demonstrate how text and images can be used in e-learning.

For this challenge I shared four simple ideas that were all created within Storyline. Click the image below to see what I shared for the challenge:

Slide 1: Text coming out of the image

For the title page, I wanted the text to look like it was coming out of the skyline and to create this effect, there’s actually two of the same images placed exactly on top of each other. However, the image at the front has been cropped:

In the timeline, the complete image is at the bottom and the cropped at the top:

Placing the text box in the middle creates the effect that it’s coming out from behind the buildings but really it’s just coming out from behind the cropped image. There’s a ‘Fly In’ animation on the text with the duration set to 3.5 seconds and coming in from the bottom (set in Effect Options).

Slide 2: Text overlay 1

This slide full screen image with a rectangle shape containing some text) placed to the right. The shape has a ‘Fly In’ animation (1 sec duration and coming in from the right). I also made the shape slightly transparent by right-clicking on it, selecting ‘Format Shape’ and adjusting the transparency to 25%.

Slide 3: Text overlay 2

On this slide, I coloured the background pale grey, and positioned my image at the top of the slide. Then I added a rectangle that slightly covered the image and didn’t completely fill the space at the bottom. The text itself sits in a text box on top of the shape and I applied a fade animation (1 sec duration). From the ‘Effect Options’ dropdown I chose ‘By Paragraph’ which makes each paragraph of text appear separately.

Slide 4: Question

This slide wasn’t built using a quiz slide (but it could be) which meant I needed to create everything from scratch. I started with my background image and added two new states – a correct and incorrect:

For each of the new states, I went to the ‘Format’ tab and increased the brightness by 10% and recoloured the images:

Then I added four rectangles, one for the question and one for each answer. For the demo, Option C is the correct answer, so I also created a state for each option:

Lastly, I added a layer that contains a button to replay the demo (the trigger is to jump to the first slide when the button is clicked) and also prevents another answer being selected (go to ‘Layer Properties’ and tick the box next to ‘Prevent the user from clicking on the base layer’).

Then I needed to add triggers to each answer option to make it all work:

So that’s how I created each of my slides for this challenge. There were lots of other creative ideas shared by community members in this challenge and you if have ideas, please share them in the comments area below.

All images used in this demo came from Death to the Stock Photo.

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December 4, 2016
Sliding Along with the Force

A few weeks ago I was delivering a Storyline 2 session in Brisbane and we were looking at the slider interaction and how you can use a slider to change the state of an object and also use it to show layers. In the change of state example we were looking at, you slide the thumb along the track and the colour of an image changes. One of the participants asked if it were possible to change the colour of the thumb to match the colour of the image and my response was “I’m not sure, I haven’t tried that before but let’s check it out and see if it can be done”.

So, I clicked on the slider and went to the states area and I was pleasantly surprised to see that sliders have ‘states’. As it turns out, you can add new slider states and then format the slider for your new states (in our class example, I could change the thumb colour to match the image colour). Cool! I was also happy that person asked this question or I may never have known about slider states!

Flashback to late 2015, and David Anderson created an ELH Challenge to coincide with the release of the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens. E-Learning Heroes Challenge #110 – Awaken Your E-Learning Force. The brief was to build a Star Wars-themed interaction, this week your challenge is.

Sometimes ideas for challenge demos come to me quickly but sometimes I need to percolate ideas in my subconscious for a while and this was one of those challenges. I did have some illustrated Star Wars characters that I wanted to use for the demo and an idea of a trivia type interaction, just no solid idea for bringing them together in a different way.

Jumping back to the present and after I discovered that sliders have states, I thought that’s it! I could create a slider state for each character (six in total) and I could also have a question for each character to correspond with the change in image.

So this is what I did:

I inserted a slider and in the Thumb Fill area, filled it with a picture of my first character. I had to play around with the sizing of the thumb so that it wasn’t too small. For the track, I chose no fill and no outline which made it transparent. Then I created a new state for each character and named each state to correspond with the character:

The thumb picture changes using a change of state trigger (one for each character):

Each of the questions is built on a layer:

I used shapes for my questions and feedback with 40% transparency and shapes for my answers choices too. As there was only one correct answer, I grouped the choices in a button set which only allows one answer to be selected at a time. The correct/incorrect feedback boxes are on this layer too and they both start as ‘hidden’ and change state to normal depending on which answer is chosen. This is what it looks like for the Stormtrooper layer:

To save some time, once I had the first layer working the way I wanted, I duplicated it and then changed the information and adjusted the triggers. A show layer trigger based on the slider position makes each layer show. So as you slide the thumb along, the picture changes to a different character and a question for that character is also shown along with some feedback (and where possible, I used a quote from that character from one of the movies).

You can try the demo yourself by clicking on the image below:

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

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March 7, 2016
Template Facelift

A few months ago I created a demo for ELH Challenge #18 which was called ‘Using Characters in eLearning’ (you can see a recap here). For this one I did a ‘meet the team’ style interaction that was based on something I’d seen a few years ago. The idea is that you have some people and some questions and you pick a person and a question you’d like to ask them, then their response is shown. You can try the demo by clicking on this image:

I was happy with it originally and it works fine but I’ve felt for a while that the design could be improved because the screen is quite full and there’s not a lot of flexibility in the layout. What I mean is, say I wanted to add another person to ask a question of, I’d need to make the other four people smaller or totally move things around to fit it all in. Also, the response area is quite large and the person giving the answer is shown twice which is unnecessary. So I set about playing with some ideas as to how I could overcome these problems.

For the people on the slide, I wanted to be able to have as many or as few as needed. I figured that using one image that had a number of states (which would be images of different people) would be a good way to achieve this. I just had to make sure each image of a person was placed in a similar position and was about the same size (there was some trial and error getting that right):

Next I needed to work out a way of moving through the people. I thought of using buttons – one to go forward through the people and another to go back but then the whole interaction would be clicking. So then I thought a slider might be worth a shot. I inserted a slider, kept the design simple and added change of state triggers e.g. change the state of ‘Person’ to state ‘Person 2’ when the slider moves and equals 1 (and so on for the others states). I tried it out and it worked great. So I now could have two people or 20 and they all fit in the same space on-screen.

Now for the questions. I left the number of questions to three as I reckon that you wouldn’t need any more than three (you’d probably use less). In the original, the space for the question was just a rectangle with a glow to indicate when it’s selected. It looked more like a button, so this time I used a caption and changed the selected state to a black solid fill:

Tip: I created a button set with my questions which only allows one question to be selected at a time. Doing this creates a selected state so I could then change this state to what I described above.

As in the original demo, the responses by each person to each question are placed on layers. But this time it was a combination of one question being selected and the slider being in one of 6 positions:

I repeated this trigger for all the combinations, the ‘copy and paste trigger’ buttons came in very handy!

The space where the responses are shown is still a good size and I made use of this space on the slide (base layer) by using it to hold the instructions which aren’t visible when each layer is showing:

For the responses themselves, I again used a caption-style shape (it’s actually a combination of a rounded rectangular caption and a triangle) and because I placed this near to the image of the person I didn’t need to show the person twice on-screen.

The last thing I did was to apply some colour coding to each person and layer so that there was a visual indication as to which answer belongs to which person:

Tip: You could use videos on the layers of the person giving the answers or add audio if you didn’t want to use text responses.

If you’d like to see a published version of the updated interaction, click on the image below:

If you like to download the source file and use it yourself, just click here.

Overall, I’m happy with the improvements and I was able to try a few things and experiment. The new version is more customisable too. But best of all, going back to something I’d already created meant that I didn’t have to start from scratch. I could apply some things that I’ve learned since the original was created and I learned a few new things while working on the update allowing me to continue building skills.

This template is one of a few that I have on my new Downloads page.

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November 23, 2015
Spinning Around with Storyline 2

A few years ago, before I was working with Articulate Storyline, I saw this cool interaction where you could spin a group of on screen images around in a circle. I later found out that this was referred to as a ‘carousel’.

While I liked the carousel when I first saw it, I haven’t see it around much – the closest I’ve come is where the images scroll from side to side. So I thought I’d try and build a circular carousel in Storyline 2. In my head, the way I saw the interaction working was by using a slider and as you move the slider along the images would rotate in a circle.

I was on the train on my way into work the other day and I started to sketch out my idea on paper. I always like to start this way no matter if it’s for a client project or a simple demo like this was going to be. I find that I can jot down ideas quickly and play with them on paper as I try to arrange and re-arrange my thoughts. So this is how it started:

Then once I have a bit of a clearer idea of where I’m going (it’s never usually finished or fully formed at this point) then I’ll start playing in the tool however I’m still experimenting at this point and I don’t actually know if my idea will work!

To start with I inserted a slider and four coloured rectangles onto a new slide just to get an idea of the layout. To help with the look of the interaction, I made the two rectangles behind the front one slightly smaller and the back one slightly smaller again to give the look of perspective – as the objects move around the carousel they’ll appear to move closer and then further away.

Initially, I thought I’d use a change of state and what would happen is that as you move the slider along, each rectangle would change its state and the new state would be the rectangle in the next position. I started with just two different coloured rectangles (so that I could keep track of which was which). Plus if I started with two and could get it to work, then I could add the other two. It turned out to be a good plan because using states proved to be unsuccessful.

The first two moves worked just fine:

But the next two didn’t:

The problem was that objects on a slide sit at different ‘levels’ depending on where they are in the timeline and in this case the blue rectangle is always going to be above the red one:

So it was back to the drawing board.

This time I thought I’d try it again but using separate layers for each position of the rectangle. That way I could control how the rectangles were arranged as each layer is shown. Thankfully, this way worked much better. Each time the slider moved a position, a different layer would show and because the rectangles are in a new position on each layer it gives the effect that they are moving in a circle:

The next step was to replace the shapes with images and see how it looks. I also decided to add a couple of extra pictures – meaning two extra layers. I wanted to make the front picture stand out so I increased the brightness of the front image and changed the back images to black and white and decreased their brightness. I did this on one image and then used format painter to apply the changes to the other images. I also adjusted the layout and sizing of the images slightly and in the end it turned out like this:

Click the image to view the working demo.

While it isn’t exactly how I envisaged it originally (in my head I wanted the movement from position to position to be much smoother but would be much more complex to create given the objects change size as they move) this method does give a revolving effect and I was happy with the end result. Maybe I could try using motion paths next time…

I reckon the slide could be used for images or videos or even as a different type of menu where you could click on the front image and jump to a topic. You can download the source file from here.

Note: I also want to develop more of a habit of working out loud so I tweeted my progress as I went. It’s the first time I’ve done that as I went along and not just at the end. It’s my habit in progress.

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July 19, 2015