Team member, Ellie, explains how she used Near-Life and VYOND to make a gamified learning interactive video, which can be embedded on a website or shared directly.
Pairing VYOND’s gamified learning template with Near-Life makes creating interactive learning content quick and easy. Here’s how I made ‘Lost in Cyber Space’ – a gamified cyber security quiz.
Planning:
As always, your first step should always be to make a plan.
You can do this either in writing, using flowcharts or by making a video on VYOND to plan the storyline. Near-Life offers a exciting new AI tool that will build the layout of your video for you, simply select the AI wizard when creating a new scenario.
- I chose to write everything out first so I knew what the game would be about.
- I landed on a ‘cyber space’ scenario, where you must use your cyber knowledge to return to earth.
- Then I planned out a few questions, ensuring the information was correct.
Audio:
You can do the audio before or after you start putting things onto VYOND.
- I like to record and add the audio into VYOND beforehand.
- This saves having to adjust timings later, and gives more of a structure to the video while I’m making it.
- I wrote a script and got the audio ready.
- I used Pixabay for some excellent free sound effects and backing music that sounded ‘spacey’. It’s all copyright free too.
VYOND:
Once I had a rough plan, I went onto VYOND to start creating:
- I used their gamified learning template to start and then adapted it.
- I started putting together the animation and storyline.
Something you should bear in mind: it is better to give the user too much time than too little. Not everyone reads quickly. So make sure your scenes are long enough for the user to take in the information – you can always add buttons so the user can move forwards when they’re ready or you can show the playbar at the bottom of the video so the user can skip onwards if they need to.
Downloading media:
With my video made, I then downloaded the scenes into different clips.
- To download specific scenes within your VYOND project, click on the download button and select which scenes you want your clip to contain.
- You can then download the scene and repeat.
- Your scenes will download quicker in 720p rather than 1080p.
Near-Life – feedback:
Once my media was downloaded, I went onto the Near-Life platform, created a new scenario and named it.
I included feedback and set a pass score for this video since I wanted the end user to see a report of what they got right and wrong at the end.
Near-Life – hotspots:
- I uploaded all the media (which can be done on the canvas or on the nodes) and added my intro scene to the first node.
- I then added a hotspot rectangle over the play button and set it to default to a new node.
- I then did the same thing with the next node, which explained how the game would work.
- I put another hotspot rectangle over the start button, defaulting to a new node.
Near-Life – scoring:
- Then I added my next clip, which set the scene and had the first interaction.
- The media had 3 different choices for the answer.
- I made a hotspot rectangle around each answer and ticked to enable scoring on all three.
- For the correct answer, I added +3 to the score.
- For the wrong answers, I took -1 to from score.
- I then set each interaction to default to the same node afterwards (make a new node, name it and then go back and direct all the hotspots there).
- I used this same method throughout the game on all the wrong and right answers – adding 3 points for a correct one, and -1 for wrong answers.
- I chose to add 3 for right answers as I didn’t want people to get very negative scores if they got lots of answers wrong.
- I knew this would be disheartening, so adding more points for correct answers might balance this out a bit.
Check with the team:
I put the clips into Near-Life and added interactions where necessary.
Once I was happy with it, I played it through on the preview button a few times to make sure everything looked good.
I then shared with the team for feedback and thoughts which I could then work from.
Want to create your own interactive videos?
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