How I Built This Cashier Retraining MicroLearning

The eLearning Challenge for the first week of March was to use the new Rise Microlearning Templates.

For my interaction I chose the refresher training template.

I included a Storyline 360 block which gave the student the opportunity to practice making change.

Here is my challenge entry:

https://rise.articulate.com/share/98KYaazUc2DWIEJDxkWnqpseDa6jxUp9

Beginning with Rise

To create a microlearning in Rise, open your go to https://rise.articulate.com and click on the Create New button.

then click on the Microlearning option

You can then select either a Microlearning Template or a prebuilt Microlearning that includes Real Content.

For my interaction I chose the training refresher Microlearning Template.

Look and Feel

You may not like the look and feel of the template, so the first thing you should do is click on the THEME button to adjust to your liking.

Here you can change the Theme (to a pre-built option) or personalize your own changes to the Cover Page, Navigation, Colors, Fonts, or Blocks.

For my interaction I changed the theme to Horizon, changed the image on the Cover Page, changed the Navigation to continuous, changed the accent color to Sky, changed the Fonts to Oswald, and turned on Block Entrance Animation.

Adding Interactivity

Rise has many options for adding interactivity.  You can add image galleries, multimedia, knowledge checks, accordions, tabs, labeled grapics, process flows, scenarios, sorting activities, timelines, flashcards, buttons and Articulate Storyline blocks.

While all of these options are fantastic, you get the most flexibility if you combine an Articulate Storyline block with your Rise Microlearning. 

To add a Storyline block, you must first create the Storyline interaction and save it to Review 360.

Then when you add your block to Rise, you can browes Review 360 and select your interaction.

Note: Rise includes the entire interaction in its final output, which means, if you make any changes or updates to your Storyline interaction and resave it to Review 360, you will need to refresh your Storyline block in Rise.

This is all exciting, Ron but how on earth did you create THAT Storyline interaction.

The making change interaction is fairly complex, but like all Storyline programming when doing rapid eLearning, it is based on finding what works, then duplicating over and over.

Let's break this down.

Screen Layout (familiar to real life)

To begin to create this interaction I needed to determine what my screen should look like and how the user would interact with it.

Here you can see the final screen design.

You may notice some bills are viewable and others are hidden.  There is a lot to keep track of on the screen so naming conventions are critical.

So each type of bill (there were 5 types 1, 5, 10, 20, 100) in the cash drawer or till was named as above.

I used similar naming conventions for bills that are in hand (on the far right side of the screen) which are initially set to hidden and for bills that are on the deck (the top of the screen which are also initially hidden).

I also found I had to add a tag to the end of the name to indicate which layer we were on so that I didn't get my layers confused.

For example, here are the bills in hand on the open layer (drawer is open).

Simulating Making Change

I iteracted a lot of options for this interaction

Initially I thought drag and drop would be a big part of the interaction, but the additional motions involved with picking up bills and moving them somewhere else on the screen would have been tedious and would probably frustrate the end user. 

So I opted for motion paths and state changes which simulate drag and drop.  Let me explain with one set of triggers.

Starting at the bottom we see that when the user clicks the $1 bill (bill_1_intil 1) we want to move that image along a motion path.  In this case the motion path is moving the bill to the right side of the screen where the stack of hidden bills in the hand are located.

Once that bill completes its journey two things happen

1) We return the bill back to the drawer (Move bill_1_intil 1 along home 4)

2) We unhid the bill in the hand that matches it. (Set state of bill_1_inhand 1 open to Normal)

This sequence allows us to have an unlimited number of bills in the drawer.

The other two triggers are used to calculate how much money (change) is now in the hand and how many objects (in_hand1) are in the hand

These triggers are cut and pasted for each type of bill.

Learn more

If you would like to delve deeper into this interacion you can download it here.