Powerful PowerPoint for Educators: Using Visual Basic for Applications to Make PowerPoint Interactive

Learn First, Ask Ques tions Later:
The Tu torial and Quiz
This chapter has explained sev eral ways to cre ate tests and quizzes. Now
we are go ing to add a tu torial to our presentation. You could do this easily by
creating some slides with some information that pre cede your quiz slides. If each
information slide has a button to move for ward, stu dents are forced to go
through the in formation slides before reaching the quiz.
This works very well for a simple, lin ear tu torial. What if your tu torial is more
complex? What if your tu torial has several parts, each of which can be reached by a
menu? That is not a prob lem. Simply put but tons on your menu slide for each part of
the tu torial and put a but ton for your quiz on the menu slide as well.
This leaves you with two problems: getting lost in hyperspace and forcing
your stu dents to go through the tu torial be fore taking the quiz. We’ll deal with
these is sues one at a time.
Lost in Hyperspace: Where Have I Been?
In a linear tu torial, that is, one where you force the student to go from one slide
to the next to the next, there is no prob lem with getting lost. Once you allow the stu -
dent choices about where to go, getting lost is an im portant concern. That can hap-
pen when us ers don’t know where they are, where they are go ing, where they have
been, and how to get where they want to go. In the real world, there are land marks
and street signs to help you get around. Com puter screens are of ten missing those
things. Even something as simple as a tutorial with sections linked by a menu can
get confusing. The most con fusing part of a menu is know ing where you have been:
“Did I al ready do section 2 and section 3 or section 3 and section 4?” One solution to 
this is to leave some indication in the menu about where the user has been.
There are many ways to do this. One thing that you have probably seen in
your Web browser is that it changes the color of vis ited links: A blue link to an -
other Web page turns purple after you have fol lowed that link. If your menus are
all text, PowerPoint will do this au tomatically for you (although the results
might not be ex actly what you want). If you use buttons for your menu, one solu-
tion is to turn the but tons a dif ferent color. For ex ample, you can change the
color of the fourth shape on the second slide to magenta with: