Customize your Quiz using Advanced Actions (CP5)

Captivate has a lot of predefined question slides on board of all kinds. Formatting options have been greatly improved in version 5 using the Object Style Manager and the Property Inspector. But those Question slides are different from normal slides, and you have much less control over them. Just some examples:

  • you do not see the different objects on the Timeline, it shows only one 'interactive object', although you have a lot of Text Captions, dropdown lists, Text Entry Boxes and buttons on the slide
  • you can have only one type of Question on a slide,
  • the score for a Question slide is always 'black/white', correct or incorrect, you can never have a partial score
  • you can add only non interactive objects on the Question slide (no buttons, no click boxes, no Text Entry Boxes)
  • you can customize the success/failure captions for each Question slide
  • even have up to 3 different failure captions but... Review message wiil be the same for all Question slides

To have more control you can create your own Question slides. Of course this is possible using Flash (or Dreamweaver). Using standard objects, variables and Advanced actions can however result in constructing most of the Question slide types, except for the types that involve drag-and-drop (as can be used in Sequence and Matching Questions). I published several articles for different usecases. In the articles I provide a Captivate SWF to show the result and start files (for downloading), to enable you to practice the workflow described in the article. Here are the links:

  1. Creating a test resulting in multiple scores: using Advanced Standard and Conditional actions you will construct a test that will collect scores about the learning type of the user (Auditory, Visual, Kinesthetic). Contrary to a normal Quiz resulting in one score, here you will obtain three scores. Those scores will be used in the next article:

  2. Conclusion based on multiple scores: based on scores obtained in the previous article, you will use one Advanced Standard and one Advanced Conditional action to show the conclusion. I meant this article to be an introduction to the new User Interface of Advanced actions.

  3. Create question slides with partial scoring and customized feedback: one of the issues with the default Captivate Question slides is that the user never can get partial scores if his answer is partially correct. In this article I created a hotspot question slide with multiple hotspots and the user can get a partial score.

  4. Create customized feedback: in this video tutorial you will learn how to use an Advanced Conditional action (with multiple decisions) to show differentiated feedback based on the score of a Quiz constructed with the default Question slides of Captivate. This video is meant as an introduction in the terminology and workflow of Conditional actions.

I hope this can help to start using Advanced actions. Please, feel free to comment and suggest other usecases.

22 responses
Thanks! This will be very helpful.
You mention that users can construct custom versions of most types of Captivate questions except for Drag and Drop questions. It might be worth mentioning that these types of questions are now also possible as a result of the Infosemantics Drag and Drop Lite question widget.
http://www.infosemantics.com.au/catalog/widgets/question/wdgt_dragAndDropLite...
Hi again!

I have a problem that came up. I'm doing 3 quizzes in a single project file. How do I show the results of each 5 quizzes individually after they go through each quizzes?

Quiz one has 5 questions
Quiz two has 13 questions
Quiz three has 2 questions

And also, after showing individual scores, I'd also like to show the overall scores.

Is there a way I can do this in one file?

I'll appreciate your reply. thanks!

First a question: do you want to report the three scores to a LMS? For Captivate each file only can have one Quiz, so the score reported will be of all the question slides.
You can keep the individual scores of the three quizzes in a user variable. Now second question: are you talking about custom question slides or about default Captivate question slides? For custom question slides, you can start filling up another user variable for the second quiz using techiques as described in the articles. If you are talking about default Captivate questions, you can use the quizzing system variable cpQuizInfoLastSlidePointScored to add them to the user variable that keeps the score. In that case you'll not need to track the total score because at the end it is stored in cpQuizInfoPointsscored. For custom question slides you'll have to sum up the individual scores of the 3 quizzes.
I am work on captivate trial and want to make a quiz have multiple section and at the end I want to display the score of sections like in this way: Section A : (correct answer) 3/4 (question) x 1 Point = 3 Section B : (correct answer) 3/4 (question) x 2 Point = 6 Section C : (correct answer) 3/4 (question) x 3 Point = 9 Total score: 18/24 Can you help or can u give some solution about this
Sorry, but this is not a forum or a place to ask for 'free' consultancy. Yes I can create such a custom quiz. For the intermediate scores have a look at: http://blog.lilybiri.com/intermediate-score-slides
Hello, http://kb2.adobe.com/community/publishing/858/c... Does this work with Cp7 Thanks
The principles and even the dialog box for advanced actions in CP7 has not changed that much compared with CP5. Of course there are improvements, like new system variables, new statements (like Increment/Decrement), easier way to filter dropdown lists etc. But the described work flow can be done in CP7. Probably I would now use shared actions, new in 7.
Hi Lieve, Thanks for an incredible blog! I'm curious of your view on an issue. I tried for several hours to get http://kb2.adobe.com/community/publishing/858/c... to work in Cp7 using cpQuizInfoTotalQuizPoints. Finally, I got the action to work by using cpQuizInfoPointsscored. While I am relieved to get it working I'm equally mystified as to why there might be a difference in the two variables between Cp versions. Thanks
I have not checked that article (very old), but system variables have only slightly changed: http://blog.lilybiri.com/system-variables-in-ca... offers you a descriptive table for 6, and in http://blog.lilybiri.com/new-features-in-captiv... you'll find the new variables in 7. cpQuizInfoTotalQuizPoints is the maximum score that can be obtained, cpQuizInfoPointsscored is the score obtained by the user.
Hey Lieve, first of all what an amazing site - thank you so much for that. I am learning from your posts bit by bit. I use Captivate to create visual interactive manuals but I am not exactly savvy when it comes to variables and actions. However, I know a few bits and I have started completing one of your tasks. I have created everything the way you describe it in the post above. All the variable and actions. I have tried it in a brand new file where I created all the objects and also I tried using the file that you were so kind to attach here. The actions simply dont work... Would that be because I am using Captivate 7? I wouldn't think so. Maybe there is a simple thing I am missing? I have followed every word... I think I nailed everything that way you have put it. But the actions just won't work. Thank you Bobby
I am so sorry. I saw where the issue is. I did not assign the 'Execute Advanced Actions' action to the items ! Of course it would not work like that. Now all is great. Thank you so much once again - great blog !
Maybe look at a later blog post, that summarizes the events available to trigger an advanced action: http://blog.lilybiri.com/events-and-advanced-ac... You can also trigger an advanced action with a hyperlink in recent versions of CPµ.
How did you hide the preview player in atricle 1? I created multiple choice questions but could not find a way to hide the preview player.
Sorry, I don't understand what you mean by 'preview player'.
That's okay, I mean the playback player, I found it under Project-->Skin editor. But I am having a different issue now. I created a "change answer" button but whenever I rewind (hit back button or from playback) and change answer, the totalscore still remain the same.
Please, I offer a lot for free with all this tutorials. But a blog is not meant to give free consultancy. Go to the Captivate forums with questions like this.
For the article you reference "Create question slides with partial scoring and customized feedback", I went through the tutorial and added the Advanced Actions. However, on slide 2, there is a Submit button that takes me to the next slide. Are there Advanced Actions that should be initiated by this button? I couldn't find this referenced in the article. Thanks.
Regarding my initial question, I managed to figure it out on my own. I created a Conditional Action where I check if all the correct answers (capitals in Flanders) are equal to 1. If so, the THEN action is Go to Next Slide. The ELSE action is to Jump to Slide 4. Thanks for these tutorials! I know they are old, but they are still helpful and relevant.
Sorry - to be more specific re: above post, the Advanced Action I created was attached to the Submit button on Slide 2.
Sorry for my late answer, indeed those tutorials are very old. A lot of work flows could be streamlined due to more recent features. Glad you find them still useful.
1 visitor upvoted this post.