Dragster 3 on the Nokia N900

We are pleased to annouce that we have now successfully viewed and completed an example Dragster 3  activity on a mobile phone. The phone used was the Nokia N900 running the Maemo operating system. At this point the N900 smart phone is supplied with Flash player 9.4 which allows Dragster 3 activities to be viewed as part of web pages in the phones web browser. This a very exciting development and we now feel that the ability to deliver rich drag and drop learning activities on to a wide variety of mobile devices via Dragster 3 will soon be a reality.

However it is still very early days in the development of flash players for touch screen mobile devices and in conducting these tests we did encounter a couple of significant usability issues:

1. The drag and drop functionality provided by the phone touchscreen does not allow activity elements to be moved. Instead any attempt to drag and drop an element in the activity is interpreted as a browser page scrolling interaction and moves the whole activity. At this point the activity can only be completed using the keyboard controls for positioning the draggable elements. In the case of the N900 there is a sliding keyboard integrated into the phone which allows this type of keyboard control to be used without obscuring the activity itself. In the case of smartphones with touchscreen keyboards this will become a significant problem as the activity will be obscured or need to be reduced in size for this method of control to be used.
2. There does not appear to be an equivalent of mouse rollover interactions for phone touch screens at this point. This means that pop-up text feedback can only be displayed using a prolonged click on an activity element. This also causes a flash player context menu to appear over the activity. This will disappear if the user clicks somewhere outside this menu.

While it is possible to complete an activity despite these issues, it is hoped that these will be addressed in future updates to the flash player plugins available on mobile devices. We will continue to review and report on these exciting developments…

New Dragster 3 feature – specify individual draggable element colours

We were recently approached by Oxford University Press who were creating a set of Dragster 3 activities that required the draggable text boxes to be different colours.   As this was not easily achievable with the existing authoring system a new activity setting called Set individual text box / label colours was added to the activity settings page. When this setting is checked, colour selection options are presented on the activity Add/edit elements page (see below) allowing these initial element colours to be easily defined.

In the activities created by Oxford University Press these element colours are used to identify the text blocks that make up different  portions of the name of an organic chemical structure (see below).

View the Oxford University Press naming organic compounds activities