Reducing Text and Bullet Points in E-Learning

I was inspired to take part in this week’s Articulate E-Learning Heroes Challenge on the topic of Reducing Text and Bullet Points in E-Learning after seeing the wonderful effort created by eLearning Hero Jonathan Hill for his own submission about the Japanese Bullet Train.

My idea started out simply enough with the idea of dragging luggage from a circular carousel to waiting passengers to reveal some fun facts about air travel…

But that swiftly spiraled into a creative cavalcade of other What If? ideas as I started to build the project – from how it would be possible to build the animations (all built in Storyline using Motion Paths by the way!) and how we could easily allow switching between facts as luggage was claimed (meaning that characters always replace each other so each colour suitcase remains clickable during the interaction!)

In the end I had to adapt my idea due to the fact that Storyline 360 doesn’t allow for moving objects to be included in freeform drag-and-drop interactions, something I wasn’t actually aware of until I took on this project, and so is good to know and to think about for the future.

It also occurred to me during development that applying click states to moving targets is not the greatest approach when planning for accessible eLearning, hence why I also introduced the same click actions onto each character.

The last thing I want to mention is that if you try and time it right you can get suitcases to overlap on the carousel. I was going to try and prevent that from happening using some additional logic – perhaps an object intersection trigger that creates a delay for the suitcase to appear in a blank space, but to be honest with you I quite like that this could happen much like in real life! (And only minor chaos would ensue as the top suitcase would then have to be redeemed first, but at the same time I have seen some luggage carousels built with sensors to prevent case stacking, perhaps you have too?!)