Often when we talk about our work, we talk in terms of ‘what’ we did. The Showing My Work series of posts aim to also capture the ‘how’ something was done.

E-Learning Heroes Challenge #98 – E-Learning Buzzword Bingo Games. The brief: This week your challenge is to create an e-learning buzzword bingo card or interaction.

My first idea for this challenge was to create a bingo card using the most overused words in learning, for example engagement or thought leader or wearable technology. But then I had another idea, instead of using words you might hear at a conference why not pictures of people you might see at a conference (so strictly speaking I did deviate from the brief a little with this one).

As DevLearn is coming up soon I figured that would give me a good list of folks who I could include and as it turned out, they’d be the ones whose sessions I would like to attend if I was going to the conference. The idea is that you mark them off if you see their session or see them around during the conference.

The first thing I did was make a list of people to include on my bingo ‘card’ and then locate an image of each. I inserted my first image into PowerPoint and used the cropping tool to make the image as close to a square as I could. Then as I wanted a round picture of each person I was able to use the ‘Crop to a Shape’ feature and select a circle:

Once I had my circle image, a quick right-click ‘Save as Picture’ and I was done. I then repeated this process for each image.

Next I jumped into Storyline and inserted a background image of stars in the night sky (from Shutterstock) because these folks were some of the stars of DevLearn! I placed each image on the slide and because it’s a game, I wanted to allocate points for each person you see. To do this, I used the ‘states’ area and I created a second state for my first image:

I used the disabled state (because then it could only be selected once) and I just darkened the image and placed a text box on it with their name and points value. Then when I was finished, I clicked ‘Done Editing States’. To save some time, I used ‘Format Painter’ to copy the formatting from my first picture to all my other pictures and all I needed to do was change the name of each person on their disabled state.

I then added a trigger to my first image to change the state to disabled when clicked:

Again, to save time I copy and pasted this trigger onto each image:

In order to keep score, I needed a number variable which I created and called ‘Points’ and then I added a trigger to add points to the variable:

I was also able to copy and paste this trigger onto all my other images saving me some more time. Finally I added a reference to this variable in the bottom left corner %Points% that changes each time an image is pressed.

The only thing left was to make something happen when all of the people were chosen so I simply added a layer with the following trigger:

As the challenges are a good place to practice using Storyline, I also thought I’d try something that I haven’t done before which was to add an image as a background to the published HTML output (behind the Storyline project). I reused the stars image and this tutorial from David Anderson explains how to do it.

All up the demo took less than two hours hours to put together. You can see it for yourself by clicking on the image below to launch the demo:

Let me know what you think and you can see all of my ELH Challenge entries on My Portfolio page.