Summary: Use the zoom tool in Quizmaker to easily add hints to your questions.
Difficulty: Easy

I got a mail over the weekend asking how to add a hint to a question in Quizmaker ’09 without actually giving the response. The requirements were as follows:

“HINT FOR STUDENTS TO HELP STUDENTS ANSWER QUESTIONS IF THEY STRUGGLE TO ANSWER QUESTION

We would like to provide HINT button next to each question which students could optionally click to get some ideas how to solve the question. That means if the student is struggling to solve a particular math or physics question, the student could click on HINT and then get the content of the hint which is some advise or steps how to solve the question. The student could use the hint and then attempt to solve the question himself instead of guessing the answer ( if multiple choice). This HINT shall NOT be the same as the correct solution of the question which the student could see after going through the quiz.”

Having thought a little, I saw two solutions, a slightly long-winded solution but which would work fine and which we’ll look at first, and another neater solution which I am going to describe later.

VIDEO HINT

The slightly more cumbersome way to give a hint to a user is to insert a video onto the slide. Users can play the video to see the clue or hint. This is a great solution except that you need to create a video and that will take a little time. A couple of ways of creating simple videos include:

1. Use Presenter to create a video

An easy way to create a video is to harness the Flash-building capabilities of Presenter ’09 and insert a SWF file into Quizmaker. Jeanette Brooks from Articulate describes the method in this Screenr:

2. Use Screenr to create a video

Depending on the type of clue you want to give, I suppose an even easier way would be to use Screenr to take a video of some text in Word or even a PowerPoint slide and then, without publishing to Twitter, just download and insert the MP4 file into Quizmaker. That way, you could easily add an audio track to your clue too.

PICTURE HINT

There is another really cool way of adding a hint and that is to use a simple image.

Using a screen capture tool like the Snipping Tool in Windows 7 or Snagit!, capture your clue in the form of an image.

Go into Slide View and insert your picture hint onto the slide. Here is a demo:

View Demo

Now the question is, how do you make the image appear from nowhere?

Well, as you might have seen, the magnifying glass button is actually the zoom function in Quizmaker. Whenever you add an image to Slide View in Quizmaker, you can add a zoom function such that when the learner clicks on it, the picture will expand to full size. So the secret here is to make the image invisible and only appear when the zoom button is clicked. And you can do that by making the image so small on the slide that it is just not seen. Making an image 1 pixel by 1 pixel effectively hides the image altogether.

1. Place the image on the slide.
2. Right-click the image and select “Size and Position”. You’ll see the Size and Position dialog box.
3. Uncheck the “Lock aspect ratio” box.
4. Put a size of 1 px for the height and width of the image.



5. Go to the Position tab.
6. Enter the horizontal and vertical position of your image.

You could just click and slide the image but with it now being so small using the Position attibutes might be easier.



7. Click Close.
8. Now, go straight to the ribbon at the top of the Format tab in Slide View and click on the Zoom button.

You will already be in the Format tab so just click on the zoom button.

That’s it. All that is left for you to do is to add a Hint text label or something to show that a hint is available when they click on the button.

Notes:

You can add several hints to the same page. Just add several images and make them really small.

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