Load an Articulate Quiz into your Flash Project

I recently completed work on a new flash based course. Basically the course is made up of several captivate demos and a final articulate quiz that are all loaded and navigated through a main flash portal / shell. This main swf file loads all the other swfs including that quiz.swf file that Articulate Quizmaker produces.

I also used the SCORM HTML and javascript that Articulate publishes when you choose publish for LMS. In my case I just swapped out the body of the quiz.html and embedded my own swf portal. This way when I load the quiz it will still have access to all the JS it uses when it's by it self right?

well yes and no.

It seems that if the quiz.swf doesn't get the flashvars it needs when it first loads up, it shuts off all tracking calls, boo-urns!

Well the trick here seems to be in the actionscript, this works for IE I have not tested for other browsers:

function onLoadComplete(mc:MovieClip)
{
/*assuming mc is the quiz.swf, initiating these variables will turn on tracking*/
mc.vHtmlContainer=true;
mc.vCaptureRC=false;
mc.vIE=true;
}

Enjoy! and if you have a better way feel free to contact me!

One giant leap for serious games

Can gaming be a serious contender for a form of education?

It seems a pretty big employer is working with a pretty big gaming company to prove so.

Certainly not everything is suited for learning via gaming, but McDonalds is recognizing that their employers need to learn some pretty specific tasks that can be easily replicated within a gaming simulation on a format that their employees will already be familiar with.

I'm amazed this has taken this long to figure out considering Burger Time was released in 1982.

A couple things

1. Couple of comments on an old post about inserting a flash swf into an Articulate quiz to get the student name from SCORM. Given the interest in this technique I am looking into file hosting options to start to actually post sample files as opposed to just the code. So if you have suggestions for (free) file hosting I would love to hear them.

2. A very geekish article on using alternate grading to increase motivation, I think it's fantastic and could be applied without the heavy gaming overtones.


Should be posting regularly again, I'd give you my excuses, but it's my blog I can post if I want to.