Everyday Features:

Scoring

keeping score in games and elearning

Keeping track of a user's progress is essential for both games and elearning projects. Opus Pro and Opus Creater make scoring easy by tracking many score metrics automatically but also allowing you the flexibility to control the scores yourself. If you use the Store Score action, the program automatically keeps track of the number of correct and incorrect answers, the value of the score and the percentage of correct answers.

Storing the Score

The Store Score action is the simplest way to keep score. Simply decide on the trigger you want to cause the score to change - for games this might be a collision detection when one object hits another, or for quizzes it might be a click on a button or an object dropped. Then add a Score action in the usual way and select the options you want for the score from the dialog which appears.

Alternatively you can simply create your own variables to store scores in and then use the Set Variable action to update them yourself.

Pro Scoring

Opus Pro offers more sophistication in both preset and customised scoring. The Question Object is intended for elearning publications and will automatically store the same metrics as the Store Score action but also includes variables which track whether the course or topic have been passed or failed, and even calculates whether the user can still achieve a pass mark given the results so far.

Any of the Opus triggers can be used to store a score and they can be used with the programming actions and OpusScript.

Score Variables

A set of variables are pogrammed into Opus to store the scores and you can access these like any other variables. The Store Score action saves to a series of variables such as SCORE_VALUE, SCORE_PRECENT and SCORE_CORRECT. Whilst the Question Objects uses those with a Q at the start of the variable name such as Q_SCORE_VALUE, Q_SCORE_PERCENT_TOTAL and Q_SCORE_TOPIC_PASSED.

Note:The Store Score and the Question Object use different scoring mechanisms so you cannot use them both in the same publication unless you manually combine the two sets of scores using scripting.

Conditional Branching

When keeping score you will often want to test the score for a particular value and perform an action based on what the score is. This might be to see if the user has reached a certain level or pass mark or not. This is called conditional branching and is most often performed using an If...then statement which is ready-made in Opus and available from the Programming tab. In the example below we are testing to see if the score is over 80% and sending the user to the Pass page if it is.