- Or “Alternative uses of ToolBook’s Simulation object”.
Background
I have often faced the challenge of having to make more complex interactions or questions than what is possible out of the box using ToolBook’s catalog objects. Very often you or your client wants a combination of multiple questions but scored as one question – or they want to use a type of questions not available in the ToolBook catalog – such as a “dropdown question” or similar. See pictures below to get an idea of the kinds of interactions we are talking about.
While this can be done with standard ToolBook, it typically involves writing Action Editor Code. Furthermore Feedback is very troublesome to define for people with Action Editor Skills.
Using the Simulation object as a framework makes the task of developing complex questions/interactions much less complicated and much easier to maintain. The interactions do not appear to be simulations to the end user but look like normal interactions.
An example
The file contains two pages. The first page is an interaction with what appears to be 10 True-False questions - but when you press the Evaluate quiz you will probably guess that it is really a simulation.
The second page consist of 4 Dropdown Questions evaluated as one, notice the way the feedback provides hints for the first attempt and just provides the answer for the second attempt
Setting up the objects
First create all the objects you need on the page to create the question. In our example that means creating a button (name it evaluate Quiz, and set the caption to Evaluate Quiz), and setting up radio button groups and the text fields with text for each question on the first page and the dropdown boxes and field with the text on the second field.
Setting up the Simulation
Insert a new Simulation (insert/new simulation).
Create 1 step, this will act as the entire interaction, and set up feedback and instruction fields of your choice.
(using the default values for the rest of the simulation settings will be ok, but make sure that the initial mode of the simulation is set to Practice, and that the simulation starts when entering the page)
Now and set up a Button Click trigger Object in the simulation object. Make the Evaluate Quiz the trigger object.
On the first page set up the 10 radio button groups as evaluation objects, and write feedback for each evaluation object. The second page setup the combo boxes as evaluation objects and write feedback for each object
That's it!
You can download the Toolbook 9 file I used in the above example from the download page.
A few notes
The example uses radio buttons and combo boxes but all sorts of objects can be used.
There is one action on each Simulation. On Complete simulation the text property of the feedback field is set to “good Job” to indicate that the simulation has ended.
In this case the example was inspired by Danish soccer lottery coupons (where true - false are replaced with Win - lose).
I hope you have found this article useful, comments and suggestions are welcome
Happy ToolBooking
Tomas Lund