Drag and drop - use a single drag item for more than one target?

Jul 11, 2015

Hello:

I am trying to create a drag and drop exercise in Storyline 2 where the drag items may have more than one target. This means, when you drag an item, it stays in the drag item list so it can be used again for another target. Is this possible?

Thank you,

Greg Tomsho

10 Replies
Mahesh  Nalluri

Hi Greg Tomsho

Greeting of the day

I have done by taking four examples, if we drop correct drag option in the correct drop target then correct popup will appear if not wrong item will go its initial position.once we place a correct drag item, then the first drop target will disappear and second drop target will appear.

Please look at the published file.

I think this will help you.

Greg Tomsho

Hi Ashley and Mahesh:

Thank you for your replies. I have done considerable research and experimentation of the Drag and Drop feature in Storyline 2 and unless I'm really missing something, it appears it simply doesn't have the flexibility I need for this exercise.  The following figure illustrates what I am trying to do (although this a trivial example, the actual problem involves computer network subnet addresses).  In the example, I have six boxes labeled 1-6 and three boxes labeled with equations in them.

Drag and Drop Example

In the exercise, the students must solve the problem. As the solution, any one of the six boxes labeled 1-6 can be placed in any of the three boxes with the equations. In addition, the numbered boxes may be used more than once. For example, box 5 may be placed in the first and second boxes since the equation equals 5.  Box 6 should be placed in the third box since the equation equals 6. To determine if students got the problem correct, I would need to know which numbered box was placed in each equation box. I can find no way to determine this since Storyline 2 only lets you check if the drag item was placed in the proper drop target but it doesn't let you determine if a drop target has a particular drag item in it.  In addition, box 5 is used twice, which Storyline does not permit. I could put multiples of each drag item (for example, I could put three number 1 boxes, three number 2 boxes, etc) but that still doesn't solve the problem of being able to tell if a number 5 box was placed in the correct equation box. Unless I'm missing something, I'll need to go a different direction for this exercise. 

I will point out that Storyline 2 does have considerable power with the addition of Javascript. I wrote a fairly complex simulation that includes several hundred lines of Javascript code at http://books.tomsho.com/netplus/net.html.  I just wish that Storyline 2 would give Javascript access to more information. If I could use Javascript to access information like "which drag item is located in drop target x" I could solve this with Javascript. Thanks again for your reply.

 

Greg Tomsho

Hi Cary:

I appreciate the response. The problem is that if you drag box5 over to 4+1 (or 3+2), the boolean does get set to True, but if you then drag it back off, the variable stays set to True and it would need to be set to False.  There needs to be a way to check which drag items are on which drop items when the user hits submit and I don't see that capability anywhere.  Plus, box5 needs to be used twice which Storyline doesn't allow. I tried creating multiple drag boxes with the same value in them and stacking them on one another, but I still have the problem of what happens if the student drags the correct box to the correct target and then drags it back off again?  Again, thanks for the reply; I think I'm going to have to change it from a drag and drop to a data entry style exercise.

Cary Glenn

It can still be done. I just needed some more info on how you wanted the interaction to work. Take a look at this example I did last year for a Challenge project. You would need to add a submit button that evaluates the results and a reset button if they made a mistake and want to retry the exercise.

https://9d4c810bb2e0793f1fa7b1f03a13651daa68efd1.googledrive.com/host/0B7o5M1gB2oGzbGxGQ1IydVdJUGc/

Greg Tomsho

Hi Cary:

I see where you're going with this (although you need to reset the boolean variables when the user clicks the "Let me try again" button.) However, having a "Let me try again" button is not ideal for my exercise. Since my exercise will require that there are 5-6 of each drag item (for example, 5 "5"s, 5 "6"s, 5 "7"s, etc.), and a total of probably 16 different drag items making a total of 80 drag items with about 6 drop targets, it makes the logic somewhat complex.  I will keep in mind your idea of a "Let me try again" button as that might work, but for this exercise, I will probably go with having the user type the number into a box rather than doing a drag and drop. But, I can see where I might need this functionality in other scenarios and the "Let me try again" might be just the ticket. 

What would also be nice is a "drop-down selection" control, or what Android calls a Spinner control where the user clicks a box/button and sees a list of choices from which to select for the correct answer, but sadly that functionality is not in Storyline either. Thanks again for your help!

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