Summary: Embed an Engage interaction into Quizmaker ‘09 by editing the Quizmaker published files.
Difficulty: Medium

One of the things we all love about Articulate Studio ‘09 is how it can make us and our ideas look so professional! In just a few clicks, we can design and publish a presentation that is as good if not better than many efforts from full-time Flash developers.

And then sometimes we want to go that bit further and really make our presentations stand out from the crowd.

In the past we have looked at how you can play an Engage interaction within another, how you can put a quiz inside an Engage interaction, as well as a number of tricks with other software. They are all great fun and you can use them to great effect.

Today we are looking at the challenge of inserting an Engage ‘09 interaction into Quizmaker.

By embedding Engage into Quizmaker, you can:

• Make your quizzes even more attractive and functional by adding a full Engage interaction into a blank slide. This gives you even more scope for adding content to your quizzes before you come to testing with questions.
• Add an Engage interaction to a question. Ask your students to view a specific interaction before answering a question.
• Add several interactions in the same quiz. Have an interaction followed by a series of questions, followed by another interaction and some more questions and so on.

Want to see it in action? Let’s take a look at a barebones example:

Now isn’t that cool but …..

How do you do it?

In the demo above, I added four interactions, Flashcards, Stairstep, Labelled Graphic and the Pyramid. Two are Community Interactions currently available for Engage ‘09 and two are the regular inbuilt interactions. The procedure for importing the Community interactions and the regular interactions is NOT the same. To get the free, extra Community interactions, make sure you have the latest version of Engage ‘09 and then download the three interaction packages from this page.

Before you download the Community interactions, close Engage first or you’ll find the download won’t work.

Importing Community Interactions

Let’s look first at embedding Community Interactions as it is the simpler of the two operations.

1. Create your Engage interaction by preparing the Flipbook, Flashcards, or Stairstep interaction as you would normally and publish as a standalone interaction (ie. to the web).

To begin with, I would suggest you try to import just one Engage interaction into your quiz. Once you have got the idea, you can go ahead and import multiple interactions.

2. Open your quiz in Quizmaker and decide where you want to place the Engage interaction, for example, in a blank slide.
3. Open the blank slide in Slide View and then go Insert -> Insert Flash Movie.
4. Browse to the engage.swf file in your published Engage interaction.
5. You’ll see the interaction display in the preview window. Click ok and close.


 

6. Publish your quiz as a standalone.
7. Go to your Quizmaker published files and open the quiz_content folder.
8. Copy the engage_content folder from your published Engage interaction into the quiz_content folder.
9. Locate the SWF file corresponding to your Engage interaction player.

If you have a program like Swiff Player installed, then you can just double-click on each SWF file until you find the one you are looking for.

10. Copy the name of the SWF file and paste it into the name of the engage_content folder so that the folder now has a name like this: thenameoftheswffile_content


Typically Quizmaker SWF files that are in effect the Engage swf files have a name beginning ‘video’ similar to this: video_b36c0f8a-95eb-44df-b75f-8950d1b3563d

So your newly named engage_content folder will have a name like this: video_b36c0f8a-95eb-44df-b75f-8950d1b3563d_content

11. That’s it. Play your quiz by launching the quiz.html file. Do not republish your quiz or you will lose your manual edits.

Here is a video (recorded with Screenr) showing the edits in the quiz_content folder you need to make:

Importing Regular Engage Interactions

Importing regular Engage interactions into Quizmaker ‘09 requires an extra step or two. This is because if you try to directly import a regular Engage interaction into Quizmaker by using the Import Flash Movie function in Quizmaker, QUIZMAKER WILL CRASH (!) and it will take a few frustrating minutes trying to close it completely and start it up again. (Believe me, it has happened to me too often to mention!).

Why this should happen is due to the fact that the original interactions were created slightly differently from the new Community Interactions.

However, there is a workaround.

In essence, you just need to import any SWF file into Quizmaker at the place where you want to have your Engage interaction and then swap that SWF file with the engage.swf file of your interaction in the Quizmaker published files. When you have done that, import the associated engage_content folder.

The only thing to remember is that you must keep the original name of the SWF file in the Quizmaker published files.

You might find it easier to import one of the Community interactions in the place of your regular interaction, at first. This at least will show you more or less how it will fit on your slide.

1. Follow steps 1 to 7 from Inserting a Community Interaction (use the Stairstep interaction, for example)
2. With the quiz_content folder open, go to the regular Engage interaction published files folder and copy the engage_content folder.
3. Paste the folder into the quiz_content folder
4. Rename the engage_content folder so that it has the name of the SWF file as per steps 9 and 10 above.
5. Now go back to your regular Engage interactions and copy the engage.swf file.
6. Paste the engage.swf file in the quiz_content folder.
7. Copy the name of the video… SWF file and then delete it.
8. Rename the engage.swf file by pasting the name you just copied so that it has the same name as the one you just deleted.
9. Now you have added an engage_content folder and replaced the original engage.swf (from the Stairstep interaction) with the new one from your regular Engage interaction, and you have made sure the names match and are recognized by Quizmaker.

This video shows this technique and should hopefully make things clearer.

Notes:

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