Open Access Week is almost here! To celebrate, another librarian asked me to update our existing Open Access Jeopardy game with additional questions and another round. (Note: I’m not responsible for the questions [some of them are crazy], only for developing the game).
I originally developed OA Jeopardy from an amazing Jeopardy template created by E-Learning Heroes member John Harker. I have a habit of making many of my Storyline raw files available under Creative Commons licenses for others to reuse, so my delightful colleagues at Arizona State made it their own! (The power of Twitter!)
For this new version, players must win the game to enter a drawing for Cal State Fullerton swag. This was a design challenge: there are 30 questions altogether related to Open Access and our forthcoming institutional repository. The average person is not going to be able to answer most of them. So how do you determine the necessary points to “win”?
Furthermore, the requesting librarian mentioned that they might load this game onto a touchscreen TV, which would be left in a public space for passersby to play. But if it’s unattended, some people will play only a few questions, and then give up! How do I program the game to automatically reset for the next player? (I was thinking of museum or visitor kiosks and how they reset automatically for the best user experience).
Solutions: I decided that players would have to achieve half of all possible points on the first round to move onto the second round. The score resets at the beginning of round two, which is Double Jeopardy, and players are given a new target, which is again, half of all possible points on round two!
Figuring out the auto-reset problem in Storyline was tricky, because Storyline doesn’t have a feature that allows you to set triggers to jump to given points on a timeline. I wanted to give players a warning that the game was going to time out, not just have it reset on them, so I designed a slide with a ten-second countdown which warned users of an impending reset, and placed triggers on the base slide at a few minutes apart that would jump to the reset slide.
Each question is on a separate layer and the layers pause the timeline of the base slide so that as long as the player is actively playing, they should have oodles of time before a reset slide would appear.
The reset slide jumps to a full reset of the game and ends up on a splash screen that invites users to play and refreshes itself every 60 seconds to draw attention and also keep the images from burning into the TV screen (though, is that even still a thing?).
Anyways. While I’m still not responsible for the questions, I’m pleased with the solutions I came up with to these design challenges. I ended up making two versions: one that you can email to faculty/whoever to play on their own time that won’t reset automatically, and another that has the built-in auto-resets that we can plop onto a touchscreen TV and leave out for people to play.
Try them out yourself, and download the raw files if you like!
Happy Open Access Week!
Play Now and Download
Open Access Jeopardy 2 – Private Computer Version
Open Access Jeopardy 2 – Kiosk Version
You can still download the original one-round version over on my portfolio.
One reply on “All New Jeopardy for Open Access Week”
[…] wrote recently about my experience re-designing my Open Access Jeopardy game for standalone use on a giant touchscreen TV. I had actually created two versions: one to be included on an email to […]