The challenge

Articulate Storyline’s core authoring features (states, layers, and triggers) are the building blocks that make it easy for virtually anyone to create interactive e-learning.

But when you want to create more dynamic and personalized learning experiences, you have to know how to use variables correctly. This week, our challenge was to share an example that demonstrates how true/false variables can be used in e-learning.

It was meant to be part of a project that I have been working on about museums of Cyprus but at the very end I abandoned the 100% mobile approach I am using here, to a universal 1920 x 1080 one. So without further ado, here is  my example that demonstrates how true/false variables can be used


How to 

The first scene is made up of 3 hotspots each indicating a marker that redirects the user to a scene of a museum (called mini game). Three True/False variables (Museum1, Museum2, Museum 3) are used to indicate if each scene is complete. Initially they are set to False so when the user completes the appropriate scene the variable becomes True. When each scene is complete, the user is returned back to this initial slide where a condition checks each scene’s variable (Museum1 for Scene 1, Museum 2 for cene 2 and Museum 3 for Scene 3). If any of the variables is found “True” then the marker’s state changes to “Completed”.

Each time the user returns to this slide after completing the scenes a condition checks if all three of those variables have changed to True. Then, if all three variable are true the whole course is considered Completed/ Passed (to notify the LMS for the SCORM status) and immediately the user is shown the “Completed” layer.

To successfully consider the scene complete the user has to answer all questions correctly (Results.ScorePercent=100) as shown in the picture below. If the score is 100% then the user is shown the “Correct” layer

At the correct layer the variable “Museum1” is being set to True since the user in order to view this layer must have answered every question correctly. 

I have also used True/False variables to alter the status of the diamonds, called Q1,Q2,Q3 and so on. Those are not variables, they are just the names of each picture that show a diamond. So, If an answer is given correctly, at the Correct layer I have added a condition that states ” Set GameXStarX to True “. GameX varies from 1 to 3, based on which mini quiz the user tries to complete and Star varies depending on the number of diamonds each game has. So the diamonds that are used to notify the user for one’s progress have the following variables

Game1Star1- Game1Star5

Game2Star1-Game2Star4

Game3Star1-Game3Star4

So in total there are 5 Diamonds for Game 1, allthough they are named Stars in my variables (:P) , 4 for Game2 and 4 for Game 3

Finally it should be mentioned that since I wanted the progress of the user to be always visible, in every question there are conditions that show to the learner which questions were answered right and which of them wrong or not yet answered in the form of diamonds (remember they are called Q1,Q2,Q3,Q4,Q5 in the following screenshot). Each diamond has a correct , incorrect and incomplete status. So when the learner gives a correct answer we have the following process

Game1Star1 becomes True (previous screenshot) -> next question checking if Game1Star1= True, then change the status of the Q1 (the diamond) to status “correct” (screenshot below).

This sort of code runs in every single question in order to change the state of the diamonds based on learners’ responces. 

That’s all folks for this week. Hope my tutorial may be helpful for somebody who wants to experiment with True and False variables.