Level Up Your E-Learning With These Popular Game Templates
Since we’re on the topic of games, let’s start off with a “Would you rather . . .” question. Here we go: Would you rather take a one-hour online test or play a one-hour online game? My bet is that you chose the one-hour game. And that’s no surprise—games are usually fun, whereas tests can be boring or difficult. But they don’t have to be! If you use gamification elements in your content—or even turn the entire learning experience into a game—you can boost learner engagement and drive performance. To help you get your game on, check out these popular game templates that you can download and customize to fit your learners’ needs. Storyline: Vocabulary Guessing Game With multiple choice questions, learners can sometimes simply guess the correct option. If you want a fun way to increase the challenge, try this vocabulary guessing game by Karlis Sprogis instead. By giving learners the number of letters in the word and limiting the number of attempts, you’re appealing to their competitive nature—will they find the correct answer in time? Or will they see the dreaded game-over screen? Storyline: Jeopardy-Inspired Game Show Template Do you need to test learners on multiple topics? This popular game show template by Sarah Hodge is just the thing to turn a boring assessment into a familiar and fun quizzing experience. Storyline: Countdown Quiz Game Want to see how adding game-like elements to your assessments can motivate learners? Then check out this countdown quiz game by Allison LaMotte. The more questions you get right, the more stars you earn, incentivizing learners to retry sections until they get a perfect score. Storyline 360: Angry Words Side-Scrolling Game If your employees communicate often with customers, the last thing you want is for them to wing it. Try teaching learners which phrases are helpful with this word side-scrolling game by Jonathan Hill. Who knew customer service content could be so much fun? Storyline: Codenames-Inspired Learning Game Need to get new employees up to speed on workplace acronyms and terminology? This learning game by Allison LaMotte will help them catch up in no time! By solving clues and looking for similarities, this game makes it fun to define individual terms and see how they all connect. Storyline: Gamified Quiz Template With Timer Need to check if employees can think and act fast? This timed quiz by Sarah Hodge challenges learners to quickly answer questions to prove they have what it takes. Wrap-Up So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and download any or all of these games and gamification examples and customize them to fit your needs. Or, create your own game-inspired project and share it in the comments below! We love seeing new and innovative ways to engage learners. If you need more inspiration, head on over to the weekly challenges, downloads, and examples to see other creative ideas. Want to try building something similar in Storyline 360, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial.How to Customize This Storyline 360 Countdown Quiz Game Template
A few weeks ago I decided to create this Storyline 360 gamified quiz template: Click here to view the interactive version and download the template. If you’re curious about my thought process in creating this example, jump over to this article: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at How I Designed This Gamified Quiz. If you’ve downloaded this template and want to adapt it, keep reading! In this article, I’m going to walk you through the top-four FAQs about adapting this template: How do I change the passing score? How do I change the number of questions in each level? How do I change the amount of time in each level? How do I change the number of levels? This template uses Storyline 360 features like question banks, states, variables, trigger conditions, and slide masters. If you’re not comfortable with how those work, you might want to check out the linked tutorials before continuing. Alright, here we go! How do I change the passing score? By default, I’ve set the passing score to 50 percent. However, depending on the project, you may need learners to get a higher percentage of correct answers to pass. Good news: making this update is super easy! Simply open each result slide, click on Edit Result Slide, and change the percent required to pass, as shown in the GIF below: Note that if you update the passing score, you might decide you also want to update the scores required to earn one, two, or three stars. See the next section of this article to learn how to do that. How do I change the number of questions in each level? By default, each question bank in this template includes 20 questions. If you want to increase or decrease the number of questions, in addition to adding or deleting those questions in the question banks, there are a few other things to update. Let’s walk through each of them. Update the Instructions Slide If you update the number of questions, it’s important to update the on-screen instructions so learners understand how the course works. To update the instruction text, go to your timeline and click on the eye icon to hide the objects that you don’t need to edit. After you’re done making edits, remember to show all the objects again. Update the Question Slide Master Another place you’ll want to update the on-screen text is on the question slide master. Next to the variable that keeps track of the question number you’re currently on, you’ll see it shows the total number of questions—which in this case is 20. Once again, this is a pretty quick fix. Simply replace the number after the slash with the total number of questions in your project. Update the Result Slide for Each Level On the Success layer of the result slide for each level, learners see how many stars they earned as well as a message that explains what those stars mean. Both the number of stars and the message displayed are personalized depending on their score. By default, it’s set up so that: If learners get 10-14 questions right, they’ll see one star and a message saying they got at least 10 questions right. If learners get 15-19 questions right, they’ll see two stars and a message saying they got at least 15 questions right. If learners get a perfect score, they’ll see three stars and a message saying they answered all 20 questions correctly. To make this happen, I’ve added states to both the stars and the feedback textbox. I also added triggers to show the state that corresponds to the learner’s score. Here’s what those triggers look like: If you change the number of questions in each level, you’ll need to update these triggers. But before you do that, you’ll need to calculate the scores that learners need to get to earn one, two, or three stars. For example, let’s say you want to reduce the number of questions per level from 20 to 10. You decide that to earn one star learners need to get five questions right, to earn two stars they need to get seven, and to earn three stars they need to get a perfect score. Assuming that each question is still worth 10 points, here’s what that calculation would look like: 1 star: 5 questions x 10 points each = 50 points 2 stars: 7 questions x 10 points each = 70 points 3 stars: 10 questions x 10 points each = 100 points Since technically learners will earn one star if they get five or six right answers, and two stars if they get seven, eight, or nine right answers, the triggers associated with those stars and the associated feedback messages will need to cover a range of points, unlike the ones associated with three stars. Here’s what those values look like if we use the example above: 1 star: between 50 and 69 points 2 stars: between 70 and 99 points 3 stars: equal to 100 points Thanks to the new trigger panel, it’s quick and easy to make those edits, as you can see in the GIF below: Finally, remember to update the text in the feedback message states to reflect the number of questions learners need to get right to earn one, two, or three stars, as shown in the GIF below: Update the Gameboard Slide The number of points earned—which, as we saw in the previous section, changes when you adjust the number of questions in each level—also impacts two things on the gameboard slide: The number of stars that learners earn The layer that appears when a learner unlocks a new level Updating these triggers looks very similar to what you just did on the result slides. Here’s a GIF that shows me updating those triggers for Level Two: You’ll need to repeat the above process for Levels Three to Five. The good news is that even though there are a bunch of triggers to update here, it’s super-fast since you can do it directly in the trigger panel. And those are all the updates you’ll need to make if you want to change the number of questions in each level. You did it! How do I change the amount of time in each level? By default, learners get one minute to complete each level. For every correct answer, they get an extra five seconds added to their time. If you want to change the amount of time learners start off with, you’ll need to do a few things. Let’s walk through the steps together. Update the Default Value of the Time Variable Start by adjusting the X variable, which counts the total amount of time remaining in seconds. In my template, I set the default value to 60—to give learners one minute to complete each level: If you want to give your learners more or less time, you’ll need to adjust the default value of this variable. Extend the Timer Past Two Minutes (Skip If Decreasing Time) If you’re decreasing the amount of time learners have to complete a level, you can skip this step. However, if you’re increasing it, you’ll want to pay close attention. In my template, a variable called M displays the number of minutes remaining. Even if learners get all the questions right, it’s not set up to work for anything above two minutes. If you decide to give learners extra time, you’ll need to make a couple of adjustments. The minuter-counter functionality is set up on the top-level slide master, on the Slide Loop layer: To figure out how many triggers you’ll need to add, start by calculating the maximum number of minutes that learners could end up with if they got all the questions right. For example, let’s say you decide to give learners two minutes (or 120 seconds) to start out with. To figure out how much total time they could end up with if they get all 20 questions right—and receive a five-second bonus for each—you’d end up with this calculation: 120 + (5 x 20) = 220 seconds. To find the number of minutes, simply divide that number by 60. In this case, the answer is three minutes. To make the timer work for this scenario, you’ll need to: Update the trigger that sets the number of minutes, in this case two, to include a range rather than anything above 120. In other words, you want to set M to 2 if X is between 120 and 179, instead of if it’s equal to or greater than 120. Add a new trigger to set M to 3 if X is greater than or equal to 180. Note that these triggers appear twice—once when the timeline starts and again when the timeline ends—so you’ll need to update them twice. Here’s a GIF that shows me updating them: Update the Reset Triggers Since the timer needs to start over whenever learners begin a new level, you’ll need to update the triggers that reset the starting value of the X variable—which controls the time remaining—in a few spots: On the gameboard slide: On the retry buttons located on the Success and Failure layers of the result slides for each level: Remember to do this on the Success and Failure layers for every single level, or the timer will automatically reset to 60, since that’s the amount of time I set the template up for initially. And you’re done! You’ve successfully updated the amount of time learners have to complete each level. How do I change the number of levels? If you want to split your quizzes up by topic, but you have more or fewer levels than are included in the template, no problem! In this section, I’ll walk you through how to customize the number of levels. If you want to decrease the number of levels, all you need to do is delete the associated scenes as well as the buttons and layers on the gameboard slide. Easy-peasy! However, if you want to add an extra level, there are a few additional steps. Let’s take a closer look. Create a New Level To create a new level, start by inserting a new scene. From there, duplicate one of the existing question banks and insert a new draw into your scene. If you’ve never used question banks before, check out this tutorial: Understanding Question Banks. Next, copy one of the existing result slides and paste it into the new scene, after the question bank draw. If you want, you can update the color of the buttons learners use to select their answers. In my template, I used a different color for each level—to match the color of the button leading to that level on the gameboard slide. Update the Gameboard Slide On the gameboard slide, decide where to insert the button for the new level. As you can see in the screenshot below, there’s a good amount of space between Levels Four and Five, so that may be a good place to put it. To create the Level Six button, duplicate the Level Five button and the associated stars. Then, update the button’s fill color so that it’s different from all the other levels. Next, move the Level Five button to the left, making sure to delete a few of the circles on the path to make space for the new button. Then, update the level number on the duplicated button to 06: Remember to update the fill color and level number in both the Normal and Disabled states, so that they appear correctly whether the level is locked or unlocked. For more tips on working with states, check out this tutorial: Adding and Editing States. Each level has its own layer on the gameboard slide. On each layer, you’ll notice that the path animates to lead up to the button for that level. An arrow and an instruction also appear so learners know which button to click. Finally, the button state changes, effectively unlocking the level. If you’re adding one new level, here are the updates you’ll need to make. On the Level Five layer, delete the part of the path that leads to Level Six and move the arrow and text so that they point to the Level Five button: Then, on the Level Six layer, get rid of the animations—without deleting the circles themselves—on the part of the path that leads to Level Five, and delete the circles that overlap with the Level Five button. Next, update the instruction text to say “Level Six” and update the button that the trigger points to. When you duplicated the level button earlier, the triggers associated with the level button were also duplicated. However, you still need to update a few things: The value of the variable that’s updated when the user clicks to indicate the level the user is currently working on The result slide the button resets The quiz slide the button jumps to Here’s a GIF that shows how to update those triggers: Update the Question Slide Master On the question slide master, duplicate the Level Five variable trigger. Then, change the value to 6 and update the slide it points to, as shown in the GIF below: Update the New Level’s Result Slide On the Level Six result slide, update the triggers on the Try Again buttons on both the Success and Failure layers: Update the Cumulative Result Slide Finally, on the cumulative result slide, check the box to include the result slide for the new level in the cumulative result calculation: Hopefully, this tutorial will help you customize this template to fit your needs! If you run into any issues or if you’d like to update this template in a way that’s not covered in this tutorial, please leave me a comment below. Looking for more gamified course templates? Here are few of my favorites: Randomized Board Game Dice Quiz Game E-Learning Battleship Game Crossword Puzzle Game Want to try something you learned here, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.
