Share Your Interactive Budgeting Tools, Games, and Financial Calculators #162

Financial Calculators in E-Learning #162: Challenge | Recap

Regardless of whether you’re building finance or business courses, knowing how to build a basic calculator interaction will give you a solid foundation for working with variables.

And once you’re comfortable working with variables, your e-learning world of possibilities grows exponentially. With variables, you can design personalized learning experiences, dynamically present content based on your learner’s choices, and move beyond linear “click next” courses. And that’s the sum of this week’s challenge!

Learn How to Build Your Own Calculator

Learning to build complex interactions is always easier when you have prebuilt source files to deconstruct.

Below you’ll find a handful of free calculator templates and downloads to help you get started with this week’s challenge. Feel free to rework the examples and/or use as a starting point for your own project.

Calculator Examples in E-Learning

Click to view the calculator downloads

Already know how to build a calculator? Wondering how or why you’d even use one in a real course? Check out the following examples for some practical ways calculators can be added to your projects.

Using Calculators in the Real (E-Learning) World

I like Nicole’s Training ROI calculator because it’s a practical example of how calculators can be used in typical courses. Sure, it doesn’t look like a regular calculator, but under the hood it’s doing exactly what a calculator does best: calculating.

Using Calculators in the Real (E-Learning) World

Click here to view and download the calculator

Working on a health-related course? Try dropping in a BMI calculator to let learners assess the overall state of a patient’s health.

BMI Calculator

Click here to view and download the BMI calculator

Before we move into the challenge, I’d like to share some calculator examples from different industries. The examples weren’t created with e-learning tools like Storyline, but that doesn’t mean you can’t build something similar after mastering variables, sliders, dials, and other core concepts.

Is It Better to Rent or Buy?

Use this interactive calculator to determine whether you should rent or buy your next place. The calculator features data entry fields and sliders to help you compare the costs of buying and renting.

Is It Better to Rent or Buy?

Click here to view the interactive financial calculator

Challenge of the Week

This week, your challenge is to share an example of a financial calculator that can be used in e-learning.

If you're new to variables, try starting with one of the free calculator templates below.  Depending on your comfort level, you can simply redesign one of the calculator templates or use as a guide for creating your own example.

Already comfortable working with variables? Try adding multiple variables, sliders, and interactive elements to create a more advanced calculator.

Storyline: Free Calculator Templates and Downloads

Tutorials and Resources

Last Week’s Challenge:

Before you budget time for this week’s challenge, check out the fantastic mockup templates your fellow community members shared over the past week:

Mockup Device Templates for E-Learning #161

Mockup Templates for E-Learning #161: Challenge | Recap

Wishing you an exponentially rewarding week, E-Learning Heroes!

New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly e-learning challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.

28 Comments
Preston Ruddell
Rebecca Reznick
Andrea Moxam
David Anderson

Hi Andrea! You're more than welcome to use another tool to participate in the challenges. We have a few users who regularly share examples created in other tools. Another option is to use PowerPoint to mockup an idea. Whatever you want to use is okay with us. You can share your examples several ways. You can host your published examples on your own blog or website. If you don't have a site to host examples, you can use our Dropbox file request link to send me your zipped output: http://bit.ly/ELHChallenge  When you upload your files, please include your first and last name and challenge number in the file name: DavidAnderson_122.zip If you're including PowerPoint files, you can attach them to the forums in the Building Better Courses forums: https://community.articulate.c... Expand

Emily Grinnell
Matt Ensenberger
Trina Rimmer