Adobe Captivate 4,widgets,google map

During our school days how many times we have been given quizzes around identifying places on maps. I was a good student of geography but still wondered if there could be better way than seeing few black lines on white papers. I was wondering if this has changed in this world of rich learning content. Then I thought can I use Adobe Captivate 4 to make the learning better. How would the experience be if I could add a living map application to eLearning courses. Learner can still go to any map site but the difference here is that the eLearning course would control the flow of learning. Please click here or on the image to see what I achieved. It will open a content created in Adobe Captivate 4.

Many other interactions can be thought of around this making learning really interesting.

How this was created –
We used widgets functionality of Adobe Captivate 4. The download link for this widget is given at the bottom of this post. You could download and use the widget file in your Adobe Captivate 4 projects.. You could specify the type of map and the latitude and longitude.

Please refer to previous post on youtube widget. Apart from using youtube apis we learnt to show and hide the controls depending on the movie state. We will use some more functionality to use it to create a google map widget. Read this blog post to get more information about setting up the development environment and creating a animation file using google maps API for Flash Action Script 3.We have created the user interface elements for latitude, longitude and map type which can be used to take input from users. We have written a function to set up visibility of these controls. The name of function is setControlsVisibility(). We will call this function with arguments true or false to make these controls. Most of the core functionality handling map is in function showMap().

Source files discussed in this post –

1. Source file for widget(.FLA file) – Download
2. Widget file which can be used in Adobe Captivate 4(.swf file) – Download

It could have been done in better way and there could be few bugs with the widget but would like to hear from you how you solved that.

Update 1 – You can use this widget as it is if you are not hosting it on any website or blog. But in order to put it on any website you have to change the API key in FLA file and republish the content. You can get google maps API key here.It will ask you the website url you would be putting the content.