Categories Game Needs a Convincing Ending
August 26, 2010 12:00 AM
I've been working with the Categories configurable Flash interaction and I feel it is about 95% of the way to being a great interaction, but it just kind of peters out at the end. Once all of the questions have been answered or passed, it just sits there with no questions to select from and does not display a score or even a "Game Over" message. Worst of all,the "Select a Question" message is still displayed even though there are no questions to display!
I tried adding some actions to determine when the game is complete and display my own message, but my efforts were thwarted because the variables that are accessible through the Flash Command action are not adequate to determine that the game is complete if any questions were passed. I pulled the score (number correct) and the percentage variables, and dividing the former by the latter calculated the number of questions attempted. This worked, but only if the learner responds to all the questions. Any passed questions are not figured into the percentage variable.
To remedy this, I humbly suggest that Trivantis take one of the following 3 actions:
1. Include an ending page that shows up when all questions are answered or passed and displays a message and/or score.
2. Include a 'result' variable similar to many of the other interactions that is set to 1 when all questions have been answered or passed, and is available through the Flash Command getVariable action.
3. Not reduce the base for calculating the percentage when a question is passed. (If you think about it, maybe this should be the case regardless. If I answer 1 question right and pass the rest of the questions, should my percentage really be 100%?)
The first suggestion would be ideal, but I can see that would take a pretty big effort to develop. Either of the second two should be pretty easy to do, it seems to me, and would at least allow us users to add in a custom ending.
Thanks,
Christopher Walker
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