Building an eLearning gamelet - Developing a technical Proof-of-Concept

A technical development Proof-of-Concept (PoC) is an essential part of any build to minimise any need for subsequent re-working to enable user improved experience, functionality or accessibility. Also, it serves as a key step in determining whether an initial creative concept works in practice within a project’s constraints, or whether it is just that — a concept.

Technical PoCs - measure twice, cut once

Using the right tool for the job is key in any build. While the team uses a range of authoring tools such as Lectora and can create games from scratch in Javascript, we have decided to use Storyline for this build. Storyline offers a lot of good functionality ‘out-of-the-box’ and is relatively quick and easy to use for the interactions that we want to include. The core concept of this gamelet is relatively simple, but if we wanted to build something more complex, we may have chosen to develop using custom CSS and Javascript in Lectora, or may have created something native. For this project though, Storyline will be the perfect tool.

Even with a lot of creative freedom on this project and a clear scope for what the gamelet needs to do, it’s important to avoid the temptation to just jump in and start building. A PoC is always a valuable part of the process since it enables us to map everything out in a logical order and, all being well, overcome any issues before the development stage has even begun.

Identifying and overcoming likely challenges early

One of the main goals of this gamelet is to collect user details for people that want to leave them in an engaging way, so we will be embedding a contact form into the gamelet. To achieve this, we first thought that it would be as simple as using the xApi data output that Learning Management Systems (LMSs) usually use. However, since we won’t be using an LMS for this project, plan A is out the window. So how else can we solve this challenge?

Looking at the embedded functionality within Storyline, there is an insertable object called ‘Web Object’, which allows us to link to an external file or folder. This link or file could be made up of HTML, Javascript or CSS and can be placed within our Storyline projects. 

So how could this function help us to embed a contact form within a gamelet? We can create a standard contact form like you would see on 99% of websites using HTML, CSS and a bit of PHP, and embed this straight into our Storyline project. When we tested this idea, we found it worked perfectly in a local text environment and we’re confident it will work on a production server as well. 

The possibilities of Storyline are significant and this blog post only shows a small fraction of what ‘Web Objects’ can help us achieve. If you would like to know more about how to use this function and the code we created for the contact form so you can use it within your project, please get in touch.

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