Virtual Materials Toolset: Tutorial 3: Random Cards and Decks – UnitusTI Help Center

Introduction

Preliminary steps

Redesigning our slide

Creating a deck

Deleting the Comparison Cards

Creating Random Cards

Introduction

In the first tutorial , we designed and created a simple slide with a picture of an animal (a cat) at the top and a row of three cards with animal names (including “cat”).

This slide aims to ask the learner what is the right name of the animal displayed in the picture.

Note: Refer to the card at the top as the sample and the cards with the labels as the comparisons .

The final result looked like the screenshot below:

While this design works well for the example, in the real world, it has a limitation: we are limiting the comparisons to only “Cow” and “Dog”. They are too few! What if we want to include more animal names?

Assuming we have a larger list of cards with animal names, one possibility would be to clone the slide as many times as required and manually change the comparisons in each one. This is a valid approach, but there is a better way to do it: by using Random Cards associated with Decks .

Preliminary steps

Before going on into Random Cards and Decks , let’s add new Cards with names of animals to our Pack. We are going to add “Mouse”, “Goat”, “Bear”, “Goose”. Add as many as you like!

Please check Tutorial 1 to remember how to create new cards with a layout of a single label on them.

At the end of this step, the Cards screen should look like this:

Redesigning our slide

Decks are just groups of Cards. By default, there is a single Deck called “All Cards”, that contains all the cards of your pack. But you can create as many Decks as you need and assign a Card to multiple decks too.

Random Cards are placeholders that represent a Card in your Slide. When connected to a Deck, the Random Card will randomly display a Card from the Deck, causing the slide’s content to look different in each load.

For this tutorial, we need to revisit our original design to choose where we can make use of these new elements:

In the original design (on the left), we used four cards. In the new design, we yet want to preserve the sample (Card at the top, with the picture of the cat) and also the card with the correct answer (the card with the label “Cat”); but we want to replace the cards “Dog” and “Cow” with Random Cards that will show random content from a deck.

Creating a deck

In the Cards screen, we are going to create a new Deck called “Animals names”, and we will add to it all the cards except for the card that contains the picture of the cat:

Click the “new” button on the bottom of the Decks list (left side of the screen).
Provide a name for the new Deck.
Select all the cards with labels.
Select the button “Copy To..”
Select the new Deck.

At the end of this process, if we click on the deck “Animal Names” we should see only the cards with labels on them:

Deleting the Comparison Cards

With ourDeck ready, it is time to visit the slide (or clone it, if you prefer to keep a copy of the original).

We are going to delete two of the cards to replace them with Random Cards later:

Click on the Slide option in the top menu.
Select the slide and click on Edit.
Select the card “Cow” and delete it with the menu objects -> delete.
Select the card “Dog” and delete it with the menu objects -> delete.

Creating Random Cards

Select the menu “Objects - Insert Random Card”
Select the Deck “Animal Names” from the list.
Click on the new object and move it to the position of one of the deleted cards.

Repeat this step once again, until we have two Random Cards located in the positions of the deleted cards.

Preview the slide

The slide is ready for preview. Notice how each time you load the slide the content of the Random Cards is replaced with some card of the “Animal Names” deck!

Final Considerations

Smart Picking

If we pay attention to the preview, we will notice two things:

The “Cat” card is never picked by the Random Cards, despite we added it to the Deck.
The Random Cards never pick the same card at the same time.

This is an internal feature of how Random Cards works: they pay attention to the fixed cards that exist in the deck and also to any card picked by the other placeholders in the slide and avoid them when picking the card to display.

During a session (either remote or local) the Random Cards are able to remember what cards were picked on previous executions of the same slide and will try to avoid picking the same cards as far as they are enough unpicked cards in the deck.

Once all the cards on a deck have been displayed, they start to repeat again.