Summary: You can add a Quizmaker ’09 to an Engage ’09 by manually changing the published files.
Difficulty: Medium
One of the great things about the Articulate products is how you can bring together different types of content into one single presentation. Earlier this year we looked at how we can add a Quizmaker 2 quiz to Engage 1. The process how now become a lot cleaner with the new suite of Studio ’09 products and the method has changed. So if you are looking for a way to spice your interactions with an embedded quiz, look no further.
First, let us look at what you can do:
The example shows how you can make Quizmaker ’09 appear in a new window but you can also have it embedded within Engage. The example below Quizmaker ’09 embedded within Engage ’09 which in turn has been published in Presenter ’09.
How do you do it?
- Well we are going to look at the first example in this article which is publishing Engage as a standalone. As before, create your quiz first and publish to the Web. Your published files will look something like this.
- Now open your Engage interaction and decide where you want to place your quiz.
- Select the Add Media button.
- Point to the quiz.swf file in the Quizmaker ’09 published files we saw above and click Open.
- In the Multimedia Properties box, decide if you want the quiz to open in a new window, have it embedded or Full size (as in the picture below). Unlike with Quizmaker 2, all three options are possible with Quizmaker ’09 and Engage ’09.
- If you are going to show in Full size, you’ll probably want to choose a custom image to launch your quiz. This is what you will see in the Engage interaction and what users will click on to see the quiz.
You can also decide where you want your image to appear.If you are embedding, you’ll probably want to choose as large an area as possible to make your quiz readable.
- When you have finished your interaction, publish it to the Web. (for a standalone Engage interaction).
Changing your published files
To finish your project you need to manually change the Engage published files.
- Locate your Engage project files.
- Open the engage_content folder in the Engage project files and notice the swf1.swf which corresponds to the quiz.swf which we imported earlier.
NOTE: The name of this file will depend on how many other Flash movies you may have inserted in your Engage interaction. Make sure you find the one which corresponds to your quiz. Opening in Swiff Player or Internet Explorer should bring up the swirling logo.
- Unusually, we need to change the name of this file back to what it was before, namely quiz.swf.
So your files will look like this:
- Now, open the data.xml file in Wordpad. (right-click -> Open with Wordpad)
- In the top menu of Word, select Edit -> Replace
- Now replace all instances of swf1.swf with quiz.swf. Depending on how you have inserted your quiz (embedded, new window, full size), you should find one or two instances.
- Save the edited data.xml.
- Finally go back to your original Quizmaker ’09 published files and copy the quiz_content folder and the state.xml file.
- Paste the folder and the file into your Engage engage_content folder. The contents of the engage_content folder should now look something like this:
Your Engage interaction is now ready to be viewed. Double-click engage.html to launch your interaction in your browser.
This is elegant in its simplicity. Thanks for the great tip!
Hi,
I followed your guidelines but unfortunately I had no success. I tried four different quizzes and engage programs but none of them worked.
I think the issue was at the following stage -
“Finally go back to your original Quizmaker ‘09 published files and copy the quiz_content folder and the state.xml file”.
– There were only three files in the folder. I was able to copy the content folder but there was NO state.xml file. I had the same result on each attempt.
Please provide an answer or solution so that I can add quizmaker to engage.
Thanks for your help, Ray.
Hi Ray,
Not sure. I tried a new presentation and had no problems. I inserted a quiz into the Process interaction type. Don’t forget that this will not work with the Media Tour interaction type. The state.xml file is a hidden file so you will need to show hidden files and folders on your operating system. (Doing a search in Help should tell you what to do here) but I actually did a test without transferring the xml file and it still worked. What interaction type are you testing on? What program are you using to edit the data.xml file? I use Notepad and I would try with that as some more sophisticated programs change the xml.
Regard
How do you publish this in Articulate? Do you simply add in the engage then publish out?
Hi Jeff, right I kind of mentioned this discretely in the notes section at the end. You’ll need to prepare your Engage as described in the article, publish your Engage to Presenter and then publish the presentation in Presenter. Then make the manual adjustments to the Engage files in the Presenter published files without publishing again. If you do it this way, then the Engage adjustments will be the last thing you do before you distribute. Alternatively, you can harness 7-zip to open the PPTA file and do your editing there. I’ll do an article on 7-zip soon.
I am trying to embedded a quiz in my engage product. I can not find the state.xml file that I need to copy from the quiz to engage content folder. No xml files are on the list.
Hi Tekeya, the state.xml file is probably hidden by Windows but in actual fact you don’t need to copy it over at least not if the quiz is being embedded in Engage. The quiz should work without it. Which Engage interaction are you embedding the quiz into? Is the quiz embedded, opening in a new window or opening in Full Size?
This tutorial is great. I was able to successfully embed a quiz and show another in Full size without moving the hidden state.xml files. I just wanted to point out that the quiz embed does work in the Media Tour interaction. I tried it just for fun.
Hi Jacquii, Thanks for your feedback and great that you were able to embed in the Media Tour interaction! Glad the tutorial was helpful.
Hi Dav,
The post was great. Thanks.
Can we add annotations to Engage Interactions before publishing them through Articulate Presenter?
Thanks Dave,
The landing page of the quiz seems to be a bit of an issue. “Finish” does not seem to do anything.
Is there any way to:
(a) avoid this results page altogether and just return to the engage tabs?
(b) have the “results” Button step to the next tab, next slide or somewhere useful?
Cheers
I know that you indicated in your notes that for this method works with ONE Quiz per Engage. However, There was this response:
Jacquii Leveine says:
May 10, 2010 at 1:29 pm
This tutorial is great. I was able to successfully embed a quiz and show another in Full size without moving the hidden state.xml files. I just wanted to point out that the quiz embed does work in the Media Tour interaction. I tried it just for fun.
The part of the response that I’m interested in is “…I was able to successfully embed a quiz and show another in Full size…” Do you know how they did this if you indicated that it works for ONE QUIZ IN ONE ENGAGE???
Sharon.
I’ve tried this and it worked when I clicked the engage.html file but when I uploaded it to the server, it wouldn’t work and said it couldn’t find the zoom.html file (which I can clearly see in the folder on the server). Any ideas?