Making your learning content immersive through gamification is a great way to maximise learner retention. Team member, Ellie, explains how you can use Near-Life and VYOND to create gamified learning content in 5 easy steps.
1. Plan
Making a thorough plan is a key step when making any interactive video, and becomes especially important when creating learning resources. Having factual, reliable information that is laid out clearly and thoughtfully is guaranteed to start you off on the right track to an excellent learning resource.
For my video, I ensured I had the right information regarding nouns and verbs and considered the best way to express the definitions and incorporate gamification into the video.
2. Storyboard
Near-Life’s storyboarding feature makes designing and creating interactive content easy, allowing you to map out the video before putting your media into place (though you do have the option to put the media into place as you go). Somewhat like a flowchart, a storyboard will show the decision points and allow you to visualise how the interactive video is broken up.
Creating a storyboard before creating your media allows you to gain a deeper understanding of exactly how your video will play out and where the interactions need to occur.
3. Create Media
I used VYOND to create the media for this interactive video. I considered the timings of each scene, recorded audio where necessary and added music. VYOND has a large library of songs and sound FX to choose from, but if you’re struggling to find the right audio I recommend checking out Pixabay (it’s free to use).
After I had created each scene for my video, I could then download each one individually. I did this by creating a new video that would hold the individual scene and downloading it. Downloading in a lower resolution will result in quicker downloading speed and will likely not be noticeable in most cases.
4. Build
With my scenes downloaded and named appropriately, I could go onto Near-Life to start building the interactions. This is normally a pretty quick process, especially if you’ve already built a storyboard. The drag-and-drop feature means you can easily drop each scene into the right place. You can choose from hotspotting areas of the screen, text, images and buttons to suit the specific scenario.
You can choose to use scoring on the platform in order to give or take away points for certain answers and actions. Then you can even set a pass score to show the end user whether they passed and/or their overall score. You also have the option to use inventory. Items in the inventory can dictate the learner’s journey. An example of how you could use inventory in a gamified learning scenario would be: if the end user gets a question correct they win the inventory item ‘key’. Having ‘key’ in their inventory will allow them to open the chest. If they do not have the key, they will be unable to do this and will have to get a the next question correct in order to unlock the chest.
5. Share and Evaluate
With the video built, I watched it a few times to make sure it was all as it should be, published it and shared it with the team for feedback. I was then able to make any necessary edits.
Create Your Own Gamified Learning Scenarios
Click here to learn more about how Vyond and Near-Life work well together, or click here to get started for free.