Intro

Yesterday an interesting question appeared on the forum concerning Drag&Drop

The second question is answered in that thread, was about setting up the Accept for the drop target as I have already explained in previous blog posts. The first question however is at the base of this short article. I quote:

"Is it possible to show separate messages for cases such that the user not selecting the answer (Choose an answer msg) and selecting the wrong answer (Incorrect answer msg).  It currently shows 'Incorrect Answer' msg for both cases."

I asked for some details about the setup: 

• Several drag sources, only one was correct
• One drop target, based on my answer to the other question, it accepted all drag sources but only one by one. When dragging another source it would replace the first one.
• Infinite Attempts

Drag&Drop confusions

Drag&Drop slide have some limitations such as: all drag sources and drop targets have to be on the slide from the first frame.  You can define it as a score slide or as a KC slide (see Drag&Drop Tips).  It has a lot of the behavior of a quiz slide, but it is not a full-blown quiz slide or KC side. Here are some points in its UI that I find really confusing and would love to see changed (logged feature requests about that since version 6):

1. D&D slides are automatically pausing at 1.5secs but that is NOT visible on the Timeline, only in the Timing properties, whereas for quiz slides the pausing point is visible on the Timeline but NOT in the Timing Properties. This is confusing.
2. D&D slides have an On Enter event and an On Exit event, whereas quiz slides only have an On Enter event. That is OK.
3. Submit button both for D&D slides and for Quiz slides have one or two events, depending on the number of allowed attempts. For quiz slides, the actions triggered by those events will happen after the first step of the Submit process (where feedback messages appear), for D&D slides there is only one step in Submit process. That is OK, you just have to realize that.
4. I talked about one or two events:
   1. If the number of attempts is limited you have two events: you allwasy have the Success event. That event and its linked action occur when the answer is validated and correct. That is fine, works the same for quiz and D&D slides. If you want to give the learner the time to read a Success message, which can appear automatically you have to leave some time to the learner by choosing the correct action On Success. Example: if you set the Success action to 'Go to Next Slide', learner will not be able to see a Success message. Change to 'Continue', and eventually increase the duration of the slide. Works fine, just that slight difference.
   2. If the number of attempts is limited, the second event is the Last Attempt event. That is indeed the indication in the Actions part of  the Quiz Properties.  The Failure message will always pop up with every Failure attempt, but the event that triggers an action only occurs when all attempts are exhausted. However in the Actions tab of a D&D slide it is wrongly labeled as Failure event. Many users  believe that the specified Failure action will occur for each Failure attempt which is NOT the case. This is confusing 
   3. If the number of attempts is unlimited you have only one event, the Success event. It is logical because you are supposed to try until you get the correct answer. For quiz/KC slides this is very clear because the Last Attempt event is dimmed when you choose for unlimited attempts. However for D&D slides the (alreadly wrongly labeled) Failure event is not dimmed, although it will never happend. This is very confusing IMO.

Sorry for this long explanation, needed to understand the workflow I explored to answer the question mentioned in the intro. I hope some of you, readers, will support my feature requests to 'repair' the UI and avoid confusion.

Workflow for  messages

User wanted to see a different message popping up:

1. When the submit button is clicked but no drag action has been done
2. When the submit button is clicked and the drag action was wrong

Both situations are considered Failures, but Failure doesn't generate an event until the last attempt. Since it is set to Unlimited Attempts, there will never be a Failure event. No way to replace the messages by custom text containers, if you cannot trigger advanced/shared  action on Failure.

The popup messages (Success, Failure) cannot be controlled, they don't have an ID.  You can create states for such a message, but since you cannot address the message, you cannot change the state by an action.

A possible solution is to replace the text in the Failure message by a variable, in this case I labeled it v_failure. It is possible to change the value of a variable. This is the screenshot in editing phaes of an example slide:

As default value on defining the variable I used the text to show when the learner has clicked the Submit button without doing any drag action:

The value of the variable has to change when at least one drag action has happened, which was not the correct action. Besides the events occurring after clicking the Submit button, D&D slides have also Object Actions. I will use those actions to assign another value to the variable v_failure. Open the dialog box in the Format tab for the selected drop target. In this very simple example, I used an Assign command as you see in this screenshot. I only needed it for the two wrong drag sources. For the correct source, no need to change the Failure message, since the Success message will appear. Since I used a simple action, needed to uncheck the box 'Continue Playing the Project'.

If you need to change a lot of those actions, and it is OK to have always the same Failure message, please create an advanced (oneline) action, will save you time when applying in the Object Actions. If you want a different feedback message for each wrong source, use either the Assign command (as above) or use a shared action.

Intro

This article is written as an answer to a question on the forums: Drag&Drop with Advanced Action

For quiz slides you have the option to show more than one Failure message, linked to the attempts. That functionality is not available for Drag&Drop slides. As you can read in the thread, another user posted a solution using the Object actions which are executed after each drag action.  The solution I describe here is more similar to what happens on other quiz slides: the messages will appear after clicking the Submit button. This work flow is only valid for Knowledge Check slides, which was the goal of the user on the forum. As you can read in one of my former blog posts, a D&D slide which is not scored, is reset automatically when leaving the slide. This functionality is used here. You'll also see that I used the InBuilt states for the drop target, which i described in this post.

Example 

Watch this interactive movie to see the result. It is Flash-based, do not watch from a mobile device, please.

Setup D&D Slide

The Drag&Drop slide's Timeline looks like this screenshot:

From Bottom to Top you find these object timelines:

• DragOne, DragTwo and DragThree which are the 3 Drag sources. Those objects have only one extra InBuilt state: the transparent DragOver State. D&D is set up so that the drag sources disappear behind the drop target.
  
  
• DropContainer which is the unique Drop Target. It has 3 states as you see in this State panel
  

  
• Text Tx_Question which has the Question
  
  
•  Gr_Feedback with several objects; the whole group is hidden in Output
• I_Fail and I_Success are the two sticky images
• Shape button SB_Continue with a pausing point at 2 secs, which is later than the (default) pause of the D&D (1,5secs)
• FB_One, FB_Two and FB_Three are the failure feedback messages for the 3 possible failures. The first two have an inserted variable v_attempt.

You don't see a Success feedback on the timeline, because I kept the default Success message for the D&D slide (unchecked the Failure message)? That Success message has just be edited (freeform shape).

The D&D panel, tab Actions has been set up as visible in this screenshot. Although the user provides 3 attempts, you see that I set the attempts to 1 in this panel:

Variable, Events and Actions

I used only one variable: v_attempt, with a starting value of 3. If you want to have more attempts than 3, just change that starting value. You can see its value in the example movie, center of the bottom bar. That variable is also inserted in the first two Failure messages.

SubmitAct, triggered by the Failure event of the D&D (see panel above)

This conditional action has 4 decisions, can easily be edited to have more than 3 attempts

1. Decision 'Always' is a mimicked standard action, decrements the value of v_attempt by 1
2. Decision 'First' checks if v_attempt is equal to 2, which means the first attempt (because the original value has been decremented in the first decision). If that is the case 3 objects out of the feedback group are shown: the first feedback message (FB_One), the image I_Fail and the continue button SB_Continue
3. Decision 'Second' checks if v_attempt is equal to 1, which means the second attempt. The actions are identical to 'First', with the exception of the feedback message (now FB_Two)
   
4. Decision 'Third' checks if v_attempt is equal to 0, which means the third and last attempt. It has similar actions to the previous two decisions. 
   

Here is a screenshot of the complete action:

SuccessAct, triggered by the Success event of the D&D (see panel above)

ContAct, triggered by the Success event of the Continue button

Here is the 'trick'! After each attempt I want the D&D slide to reset automatically. This is only possible when you leave and re-enter the slide. To achieve this, I used a similar (but easier) approach as explained in the blog post ReplaySlide. I inserted a dummy slide before the D&D slide, with a very short duration (0,1secs). Have a look at the script triggered by the Continue button, which is a one-decision conditional action:

When there are attempts left (v_attempt > 0), these commands are executed:

• Expression cpCmndGotoSlide = cpInfoCurrentSlide - 2
  The first system variable cpCmndGotoSlide has an index starting with 0, whereas cpInfoCurrentSlide starts with 1. That is the reason why 2 is subtracted. In human language this command means Go to Previous Slide.You can replace it by 'Go to Previous slide' as well, but I like to repeat explanations like this. Sorry!
  Alternative: Go to Previous Slide
  

  
  
  
• Continue: is necessary so that the playhead is released. It will quickly speed over that dummy slide (0,1 sec) and you'll see the D&D slide almost immediately, freshly reset because it was re-entered and not scored.
  

When no attempts are left the user is navigated to the last 'End' slide.

Tips

If you want to allow the same scenario for this slide, when the user revisits the slide, you have to reset the variable v_attempt to its original value, which can be done with the ELSE part of the action ContAct. It will have 2 commands in that scenario:

• Assign v_attempt with 3
• Go to Next Slide

To change the number of attempts, for example from 3 to 4:

• Change the default value of v_attempt to the new literal
• Create an extra Feedback message FB_Four and include it in Gr_Feedback (select both new message and group, followed by CTRL-G)
• in SubmitAct
  
• Duplicate the last decision 'Three', and label it 'Four'
• Edit 'Four', replace 'FB_Three' by 'FB_Four'
• Edit 'Three': replace the literal '0' in the condition by '1'
• Edit 'Two': replace the literal '1' in the condition by '2'
• Edit 'One': replace the literal '2' in the condition by '3'

No other changes are necessary.