Controlling the score slide!

Intro

For sure that you already have used Quizzes in Captivate. And I suspect that sometimes you were frustrated by lack of control over Question slides and over the resulting Score slide? Such like not being able to add interactive objects like buttons on those slides, not having access to the timeline of buttons and objects, limited possibilities of actions attached to the buttons, etc. Last week I proposed workarounds concerning the Score slide on the Captivate user forums and thought they could be interesting to other users. Again, I am grateful to those who provide ideas for this blog and help me by stimulating my creative mind.
 
 

Questions 

  1. The first question was about the new functionality in Captivate 5 to have Quiz results posted to acrobat.com or to an internal server. When using this feature, a button 'Post Result' will be added to the Score slide. This button appears at the same moment as the Continue button, and eventually the buttons Retake Quiz/Review Quiz. To be sure that the user posts the results, and not just click on Continue, I was asked if the button Continue could be delayed until the user had posted his results?

  2. Second question was about being able to have audio played when entering the Score slide, based on the score: different audio clip depending on the Pass/Fail status. Although it is possible out of the box to play audio after clicking the Continue button on the Score slide, for having this at entering the slide I had to look for a workaround.

Result

Play with this movie to watch the result of the proposed workarounds
 



Workarounds

Delaying Continue button

It is not possible to time the buttons on the score slide, their timelines are hidden. For this workaround I feel like cheating on Captivate and the users:
  • Make the button Continue invisible: change its style to Transparent and delete the text 'Continue' (first image in the Gallery shows properties); then I did shrink the button to a very small one and put it somewhere on the slide where the user probably never will try to click.

  • Attach a shortcut key Enter (feel free to choose another one) to this button.

  • Increment the slide duration and move the pausing point towards the end (second image in the Gallery shows the Timeline of the Score slide). In this example the duration is 10 secs and the pausing is set at 9 secs.

  • Create a Text Caption that appears just before the pausing (in the example at 8,9 secs); in this Text Caption the user is instructed to use the shortcut key to continue (after posting of course).
The idea is that the user will only see, for a reasonably long time, only the button 'Post Result'
and thus will be pushed at posting them. To me 9 secs seems a very long time, but perhaps you will have adapt them to your public.
 

Audio on entering Score slide

Here I based the workaround on a condition advanced action, labeled CheckScore and triggered on entering the score slide, and on the fact that object audio will only play when the object is visible. This is the proposed workflow:
  • Add two rectangles to the Score slide (see second image in Gallery), labeled PassAudio and FailAudio. They have audio clips attached to them (I used clips from the default Sound Library of Cp). They are totally invisible, because the stroke width is set to 0px and the fill color to 0% Alpha. Beware: even though they are physically invisible, you still have to deactivate 'Visible' in the properties panel to avoid that the audio plays automatically when entering the slide.

  • Create an advanced conditional action CheckScore, triggered on entering the Score slide. You can see that action in images 3&4 of the Gallery. It checks the system variable cpQuizInfoPointsScored, and based on the check shows either the rectangle PassAudio or FailAudio. The result is that one of both audio clips will play on entering the score slide.
Of course you can improve the workflow: having more than two possible audio clips by creating a more complex conditional action, showing images as well as audio clips, adding voice overs, etc.
 
Thanks for taking the Quiz and reading this post. Please feel free to add comments or suggest other topics.