I uploaded two contributions to the RunRev site:
- "Transparent Dialogs" and sort of a "Multiple Choice Tutorial" - a stack I choose mainly, but not only, to show how the dialogs behave.
The "transparent dialogs" - modified ask and answer dialogs that can be used with the "ask"- and "answer"-commands- differ in three respects from the Rev dialogs:
- They do *not* display the sometimes exaggerated width of the dialogs provided with version 2.1.2 of Revolution, about which list members have complained.
- The location of the dialogs can be set anywhere relative to the calling stack or the screen by adding a script line before using the "answer"- or
"ask"-command like with
"set the NewLoc of stack "answer dialog" to x,y".
Of course you have to compute the relative position x,y before.
"NewLoc" is a custom property that is set to empty when the stack closes; thus, if you do not specify a NewLoc, the dialog stacks are set to the
center of the calling stack (or somewhat lower on MacOS) as usual.
- The "transparent dialogs" show the underlying area of the calling stack or screen beneath a semi-transparent background-PNG. The transparency of the covering PNG is set to about 35% to allow viewing the underlying area and at the same time enabling the user to read the text of the dialogs.
I have also set the textsize to 14, the textstyle to bold, and the textfont to "verdana" - a font both available on the Mac and Wimdows platforms - to improve readability.
The "transparency" is achieved by taking a snapshot of the underlying area before opening the dialog stack and putting the snapshot on layer 1 under the semi-transparent PNG. The ID of the incorporated snapshot image is reset each time to the same value when the dialog is opened.
If you should like to try out - and possibly further modify - these dialogs, you could replace the Revolution dialogs with these "transparent dialogs", but I would recommend to set them as substacks of any stacks of your choice. Thus they would be called instead of the dialogs of the Revolution IDE (or - for that matter - the Metacard IDE) when you use the "answer"- or "ask"-commands.
If you don't like the imported semi-transparent pngs of the dialogs, just replace them - at the same layer - with a semi-transparent png of your choice.
As the width and height of the dialogs differ, you need to use a PNG with a size that takes into account the expected maximum size of the dialogs.
(Tested on Windows XP, 98, and MacOS X).--
The "Multiple Choice Tutorial" is more an introductory demonstration of different multiple-choice formats with short explanations than an explicit tutorial with a detailed discussion of the pros and cons of each format.
Multiple Choice is a very common, but by modern standards not very effective teaching and testing tool. Even the SAT and ACT tests are slowly undergoing changes today as non-multiple-choice portions are added to them.
But multiple-choice still remains a widely used test format (e.g. Stephen Messimer's "Preceptor Tools" also contain different multiple-choice types) and students are eager to learn how to construct and use them.
I translated a sample stack - that we use at our institution as an introduction for students - hopefully into understandable English.
This stacks contains 7 different formats of multiple-choice questions, arranged in "incremental" steps from a primitive version with fixed positions of solution and distractors (which should be avoided by all means) to a version with flexible positioning with the option to choose the number of problems from a repertoire and a "loop" for unsolved problems. After all problems have been worked on, the user gets the option to try the "wrong" problems once more etc. Thus the programs adapts to the individual needs of the user.
There are a number of things that need to be refined or "fine-tuned" (like restricting user input into the ask dialog to a certain range and specific keys) as it is not a final application intended for sale.
For better inspection the scripts are distributed across a number of buttons whose script lengths are similar - but not equal - to the Starter Kit limits, but most of these can only be edited with licensed versions of Metacard or Revolution.
The scripts can also be inspected easily by pressing the "display scripts" button and moving the mouse cursor over the buttons.
The stack uses the "transparent dialogs" described above.
Regards,
Wilhelm Sanke
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