May 29, 2017
Fluidize your Quizzes
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May 29, 2017
Fluidize your Quizzes
Lieve is a civil engineer (ir) and a professional musician. After years of teaching and research (project management/eLearning/instability) she is now a freelancer specializing in advanced Adobe Captivate as trainer and consultant. Her blog is popular with Captivate users worldwide. As an Adobe Community Expert and Adobe Education Leader, she has presented both online and offline. Since 2015 she is moderator on the Adobe forums and was named as Forum Legend (special category) in the Wall of Fame. In 2017 Adobe Captivate users voted for Lieve as a Top Content Experience Strategist.
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Intro

When publishing my first reflections on Fluid Boxes work flow versus Breakpoint View work flow I didn’t mention my expectations for a smoother creation of Quiz slides using FB’s. In my experience with responsive projects in previous versions, the most frustrating part were those (damned?) quiz slides. You are probably aware of the very strict rules to honor for quiz slides: need to be careful with ’embedded’ objects which include functionality that can be broken. Styling quiz/score slides is tough even in normal (blank) projects and turns into a nightmare when having to do it for up to 5 breakpoint views. Every post I published about quizzes gets a lot of visitors. Many questions about quizzes are posted on the forums as well. This explains why I listed Quizzes as second most important stumbling block for Captivate users in this article.

The present post is not (yet) the promised upgraded version of the most popular article I ever wrote about questions, only a summary of tips I discovered while exploring the Fluid Boxes work flow for quiz slides (score slide will be subject of a later post). If you are new to Fluid Boxes, please take some time to read the articles posted by Zeeshan. Up till now, he published 3 but promised more on their way:

Using Fluid Boxes – Knowledge Facts 3

Quizzing Master Slides -Setup Fluid Boxes

All quiz slides, and the score slide, are based on a dedicated Master slide. Master slides have embedded objects (no individual timeline): Title, Question, Answer Area with Answers, buttons, feedback messages, progress indicator to mention some. The functionality of the quiz is embedded in those master slides (two-step Submit process, updating quizzing system variables, tracking attempts on question/quiz level, review and retake on score slide, etc).
if you choose the Fluid Box work flow for a responsive project in Captivate 2017, the included themes will also have Fluid boxes on the quizzing master slides. There is one exception: the Likert master slide has no Fluid Boxes because Likert questions are not supported for responsive projects. Each theme needs to have at least a main master slide and 6 daughter master slides. Besides the Blank master slide which is essential for Software simulations and PPT-import, the other 5 daughter master slides are all about quizzes: MCQ,T/F,FIB,Sequence; Matching; Hotspot; (Likert = not supported in responsive); Result.
The Setup for the quizzing master slides is common for all included Themes. I will explain extensively the most used master slide (MCQ, T/F…) and summarize only the differences for the other quizzing master slides. The score slide, which causes a lot of issues at this moment, will be explained in a future blog post, hoping that some of the problems will already have dissipated by a patch?

Setup Fluid Boxes in MCQ,T/F,FIB,Sequence Master slide

This is the most used master slide for sure. You have the Root fluid box (ID/ FB_8) containing 6 child Fluid Boxes. The ID’s I mention for the Fluid boxes are from the master slides. Apparently the ID has to be unique as usual. When a quiz slide is created based on a master slide the ID will change: 3 characters will be inserted, referencing to the slide number. Example: FB_MS5_10 is the fluid box for a question based on the MCQ master slide, originally on slide 5. Beware: that ID will not change when you reorder the slides, which can make it quite confusing if you are used to reorder a lot. The Root fluid box (ID/ FB_8) is set up this way.

  • Flow: Vertical (has 6 child fluid boxes)
  • Wrap: Squeeze in a column , which means the child fluid boxes will never be rearranged. the 80% has no consequences, because stretch to fit is activated.
  • Horizontal Alignment: Center with Stretch to fit activated
  • Vertical Alignment: Space around
  • Padding: none, which means the space around has no effect on the child fluid boxes

The 6 child fluid boxes, from top to bottom,have this content and setup:

Title Fluid Box (ID: FB_9)

  • Flow: Horizontal – has mostly only one item, the title shape or caption
  • Wrap: Wrap to Next Row
  • Horizontal Alignment: Space around with ‘Stretch to fit’ activated
  • Vertical Alignment: Middle Align with ‘Stretch to fit’ activated
  • Padding: none, which means theoretically the title could touch the left and right side of the fluid box/slide. Personally I avoid that by adding a small horizontal padding (5-10px).

Tip: in theme ‘Clear’ the title overlaps with a design element. You can change the Vertical alignment to Bottom, and eventually increase the height of this first child fluid box to fix that. Another solution is to turn off that design element by unchecking the option ‘Show Main Master Slide Objects.

Later on you’ll see that the Advanced answers feedback messages will cover up this FB. Be careful when resizing and moving those messages. You could mess up the arrangement of this Title fluid box. Best way is to unlink those messages from the FB before touching them.

Question Fluid Box (ID: FB_10)

  • Flow: Horizontal (but has mostly only one item, the question shape or caption); text in that container is vertically aligned to top, to allow wrapping of longer text questins
  • Wrap: Wrap to Next Row
  • Horizontal Alignment: Space around with ‘Stretch to fit’ activated
  • Vertical Alignment: Middle Align with ‘Stretch to fit’ activated; for the inserted text placeholder text is aligned at the top; you could eventually change that to middle as well if you don’t have long questions.
  • Padding:  50px horizontal (text placeholder is indented from left and right side of the slide/fluid box). If the focus is on smartphones, this padding could be too big (lot of smartphones have only a width of 320px).
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