Transparent Dialogs and Multiple Choice Tutorial

[Wilhelm Sanke]

"User contributions" have been updated, surely a sign that Heather 
Williams has recovered that much to be able to lend a hand again. 
Welcome back and best wishes for a complete recovery in the immediate 
future!

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