Tag: instructional design

Serious Games: The relationship of game attributes to learning outcomes

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The relationship of game attributes to learning outcomes

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A group of researchers headed by Katherine Wilson has done a review of the literature about the effectiveness of serious games. They found that very hard evidence is available: most is anecdotal and suggestive, particularly with respect to which game elements promote which outcomes in learning. However the existing research is suggestive of relationships that could be the subject of future research. Wilson’s group listed fourteen proposals for such research, which could be very useful as guidelines in designing learning games, even if they aren’t scientifically proven.

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Randomizing Captivate Quizzes

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Captivate quizzes are easy to create, but they lack some often-requested features. Even using version 2, it is difficult, if not impossible, to randomize questions within Captivate. The following method will alter the html wrapper generated when you publish a Captivate project so that it chooses from a bank of alternate Captivate SWF files when the page opens.

Download example HTML wrapper file

When you publish to Flash (SWF) in Captivate, Captivate creates an HTML wrapper which contains the SWF file in an object tag. (Usually titled “ProjectTitle.htm”) There is a variable, “strURLFile ,” which determines which Captivate file is launched. In the unaltered file, this variable is set to the project title you set when you published.

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Captivate and SumTotal 6.5: Part 1. Setup

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Part 1. Setup | Jump to Part 2: Enable SCORM output>>

I’m involved in producing some Captivate-based assessments for use with SumTotal 6.5. There are many settings and variables that must be set correctly to get everything working to our specifications, so it took some serious testing to figure out the best settings.

Hopefully this will shorten the time for anyone with similar needs.

The requirements: We are producing competency-based learning modules and assessments. Users must complete the multi-SCO assessment with a score of 100%. They aren’t that easy, so it is expected that they will need several if not many tries to complete one SCO. Each interaction within any given SCO will allow three tries before the slide moves on.
Each SCO will allow an infinite number of tries.

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