Originally published on LinkedIn May 1, 2015
Another Articulate elearning heroes challenge – and some much-needed revision on my part. I didn’t realise how much of the maths we learned at school I had forgotten until I started work on this challenge.
A few weeks ago, the challenge was about teaching maths concepts with elearning – see the original challenge here.
We had just been on a really inspiring visit to Bletchley Park where we saw some brilliant interactive displays about code-breaking and what our troops did at Bletchley Park during WW2.
So I took some inspiration from this visit and decided to try and develop a piece of learning around probabilities, as this had a connection to some of the code breaking activities.
I know this is something my children have been covering in school, so it seemed a good subject for a challenge – and I might learn more than some new articulate storyline skills.
After a few hiccups and false starts, here is my challenge entry which is still very much a work in progress. I need to continue brushing up my maths so I can expand the content with some games and questions.
What did I learn with this challenge?
- I wanted to develop something that filled the screen and looked like it had no frames or borders – this turned out to be harder than I expected when I realised what animation effects I would have to exclude because they come from off the stage, and would look odd.
- I learnt that you can’t fully get rid of the player in Storyline without a lot of tweaking player settings. The Modern Player helps somewhat. But if I want a truly Chromeless look, I have to keep all slides to one colour, and then once published, edit the HTML launch file to make the browser background colour the same as the slide colour.
- And I also learned a new appreciation for people that develop learning materials for schools – it’s not as easy as it looks, and needs a special skillset to be able to design content for the age group.
- The exercise also reinforced the point that your peer review needs to be done by someone from your target audience. I used my children as my peer review group. My 13 year old found the questions easy, but my 11 year old struggled with the last question. So I really need to understand who will be completing this module to be sure that I pitch it right.
Keeping it Purple 