Summary: Use hyperlinks in PowerPoint to create a simple Hotspot game/activity.
Difficulty: Medium

 

Adding a bit of fun to a course is never a bad idea and if, on top of that, you can be teaching your users something useful, then so much the better.

 

There are quite a few external applications that you can add to your PowerPoint presentation as well as the Learning Games which are part of Articulate Presenter and of course Articulate Quizmaker but you can actually create your own activities in PowerPoint itself if you are creative with hyperlinks.

Hotspot Game

This article looks at how to make a hotspot game. None of the techniques used are particularly new or innovative but it hopefully shows how relatively easy and quick it is to add a little spice to your presentation.

First, let’s look at one of the demos I did for the occasion. As you’ll`see the demo is very simple and is designed for beginner English language learners. Try clicking on a wrong answer to see what happens.

 

View Demo

Download Project Files

 

As you can see, I have chosen to send the user right back to the beginning each time they get an answer wrong. This makes it more like a game but of course you may just want the user to take the question again without going right back to the beginning.

Here is another example taking the same template as above but making it slightly more complex. The principle is the same: get one question wrong, and you go back to the beginning.

View Demo

Download Project Files

Advantages

One of the advantages of using Hotspot questions in Presenter, rather than building them in Quizmaker, is that it allows you to have just one question in the middle of your course without changing the presentation or layout unnecessarily and without having a results page per se.

You can also customize the screen more than you can with Quizmaker 2.

Another advantage is that you have more say on the shape of your hotspot rather than the rectangle or square that is available in Quizmaker 2.

How Do You Do It?

Be creative with the hyperlinks. The process is relatively simple and creation can be quick, particularly if you just want to add a two or three question game.

You are basically adding hyperlinks to shapes or objects and then making them transparent and placing these transparent shapes over an image or text that you want the user to click on.

Be careful about which shapes you use as not all are supported by Articulate Presenter particularly when you use PowerPoint 2007 and Articulate Presenter 5.3. All the standard shapes should work though.

Step by step

• 1) First create the structure of your game. The above games are a series of cards or slides, going to the next question if correct, and going back to the beginning if wrong. In both of the above examples, I chose to have an extra slide to show that the answer was correct, but I could have skipped that slide altogether and made it even simpler – jump to the next question if correct, jump back to the beginning if wrong. This is what we are going to do in this short tutorial.

 

• 2) Once you have decided the structure, create 4 empty slides and label the accordingly: Title slide, wrong answer, question 1, and game complete . Put them in that order.

 

 

• 3) Now look at the first Question and build your template which you will use for the other questions later.
  Import the picture on which you want to build your hotspot game.
  Create the shapes that will cover the parts of the picture you want to make interactive.
  Link one of them to go back to the “wrong answer” slide.
  Publish to test that your linking is working.

  To link the shape, right-click it and select Hyperlink. Be careful about using different shapes and particularly the Scribble and Freeform shapes as the links will probably not work. Also, be sure to test in Articulate Presenter. Just because it works in PowerPoint does not necessarily mean it will work once published with Articulate Presenter.

 

 

• 4) Now create the shapes for all the objects you want to create hotspots for on our picture and link them ALL to the “wrong answer” slide. Change the format of the shape (right-click on the shape and select Format Background) and make Fill, no Fill and Line Color, No line (PPT 2007). Basically you want to make the shape transparent, invisible to the user.

 

 

• 5) Make any other adjustments to the presentation of the slide, background color, titles, images etc. You are going to duplicate this slide so now is the time to make those final adjustments. It will save you time later.

 

• 6) Duplicate this slide, however many times you want there to be questions in your game. If you want five questions, then duplicate it four times so that you have five identical slides. You might find you want a question for each object you have made a hotspot.

 

• 7) For each slide, number it Question 1, Question 2 etc and choose one of the objects which will be the correct answer. For the simplified quiz, link it to the next question. The others are already linked to the “wrong answer” slide so there is nothing more to do. Either add your question in text form actually on the slide OR, as I did, add your question in audio form by Record Narration or importing audio. I created my questions in the Slide Notes field so that I had something to read when I came to recording the narration.

 

 

• 8) Create your “wrong answer” slide. Choose how you want to present it and add some suitable audio if you like which will sound every time the user comes back to that slide.

 

• 9) Create your “winning” slide again with appropriate graphics and audio. The “winning” slide will be linked from a correct answer of your last question.

 

• 10) Finally, publish and test! However, I hard I try to get it right first time, I always notice a mistake, be it with a link, or a title or whatever. Do not test in PowerPoint, test in Articulate Presenter.

 

Here is the same Articulate Quiz with just the ten questions, “wrong answer” slide and “winning” slide.

 

View Simplified Demo
Download Project Files

 

Notes:

You can download the project files for each of the demos above. Unzip the file on your computer and open the PowerPoint file. It will be in PPTX format. You can download the plugin which allows you to open this kind of file in PowerPoint 2003 or earlier here. The project files should help clarify the hyperlinking structure of the games.

 

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You could be clever and add some applause each time the question is correct, or a graphic telling the user it is correct. In the first two examples above, I added an extra slide between each question, confirming the answer was correct both visually and with an audio track.

 

I added a box each time a question was answered correctly. You could do anything here. Have a number that increased by one each time for example, have a picture that completes bit by bit, have an object, animal, person advances across the stage as each question is answered correctly.

 

Make sure that your slides are set to move on “by user” as defined in the Slide Properties Manager. You might want to make your “wrong answer” slide move on automatically to the first question.

 

You’ll want to hide the navigation controls both at the bottom and at the side or else your users will be able to click through the quiz. Either show your quiz in ‘Slide Only’ view and hide the controls or else show it in ‘No Sidebar’ view and make sure you have removed the navigation controls at the bottom. If you are not happy about doing that, then opt for the “Slide Only” view solution. When your user comes to the game, put them in Slide Only view. When they’ve finished, bring them back out into Standard or No Sidebar. (Remember you’ll need to hide the controls for the Slide Only view).

 

Finally, if you haven’t already done so, be sure to check out Tom Kuhlmann’s recent article on building a Puzzle Animation in PowerPoint and Articulate Presenter.

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