An unexpected demo

If you are old enough, then you may remember text adventures and game books. And if you are a little younger, than you may know Escape Rooms or even have visited one. All of them can be really entertaining, and by tweaking H5P Branching Scenario just a little bit, you can use it to create your own adventures! Have a look!

What I customized

There was a need for new features at Technische Hochschule Lübeck, Germany. For some use cases, they required to allow going backards within a Branching Scenario. Well, that’s possible as you will have noticed in the demo content. You can even add a back button to each single content or branching question individually if you want to. The code is out there already.

The other feature that was required is an option to prevent progression to the next content until the current one has been “completed”. I put “completed” in quotes, because the notion of what completed means may vary from content to content. For now, it can be used for Video and Interactive video and will require the user to watch the last second before he or she can progress. Similarly, in Course Presentation, the final slide may have to be reached first. The code is out there, too.

Wait a minute, there was a Fill in the Blanks interaction, and you had to complete that as well in order to continue. Correct! I hacked it in there quickly. It’s not difficult to add this one or other content types and to make them insist on a successful completion, but it will require some free time and thorough testing by a third party ideally. I will attend an “OERcamp Werkstatt” early in November, which is kind of a hackathon for openly licensed content. Maybe some people will join for reviewing the code and beta-testing there.

Cup bearing the label "The adventure begins"

What you could do with it

So, what is it good for? You could create virtual adventures with Branching Scenario, obviously. If done well, I assume those might be a little more engaging than just presenting exercises to students. Also, letting students research things on the web to find an answer might be an interesting twist beyond recall questions.

But isn’t it a little boring to complete those adventures all on your own? No problem! Why don’t you design two (or more) adventures that are intertwined? Students would have to solve the puzzles on their own, but hints or solutions could be hidden within the adventures of other students. I am catching a glimpse of cooperative learning with H5P …

But isn’t it boring to stare at a screen all day? Well, feel free to integrate in into on-site settings and build your own educational escape room! In Germany, the hashtag #BreakoutEdu is used to hint to educational escape rooms, BTW. You could use a Branching Scenario as a mini quest only, it could be the guide throughout the whole adventure and require to find solutions to quizzes within the physical world, etc.

It’s your turn!

What do you like/dislike about the new features? What other ideas do you have for making good use of the new features? What other content types would you like to be included in Branching Scenario and why?

Please feel free to add a comment here or to join the discussion on Twitter using #h5p and #bs!

21 Replies to “An unexpected demo”

  1. Hi Oliver, this is very exciting. Are the things you mentioned above already available within the core H5P branching version? Or only through customization from a developer? Thanks

  2. Hi Callum!
    No, the changes are not yet available officially, but Joubel already confirmed that they will include the “go back” feature and the “prevent proceed” feature as soon as they find time for reviewing.

  3. That’s great news. Looking forward to this. Would you say this would happen in early 2020? Btw Happy New Year and thanks for your great work on H5P

  4. Impressive demo ! Can’t wait to get this strong features added to this Content Type. This will allow teachers to create progressive lessons with locked / unlocked access to the next step. Very exciting ! Also students will be able to write exciting “Book in which you are the hero” (this is a litteral translation from french to english, sorry !… ) Your contributions to H5P are very impressive : many thanks !

  5. Hi Oliver, hope you are well, do you know how I can check if the Branching Scenario feature improvements you talked about in this blog are available in the Core release yet? Thank you

  6. Has there been any updates regarding these features on H5P, Also, how do you access the H5P, HTML editor to implement these codes in?

    1. Hi Tim!

      No, unfortunately not. The H5P core team is busy finishing the OER Hub. They have not yet had the time to review the pull requests. I do not recommend to include the changes prematurely. In case the H5P core team denies to accept the pull requests or requests changes, you may end up with an incompatible version of Branching Scenario.

      Cheers,
      Oliver

    1. That’s what I am saying. The H5P core team have included my code, but added some changes that will make my version incompatible to theirs. So, unless you still want to be able to update to the regular version of Branching Scenario, you’d not use my version. You’d simply use the latest official repositories to build yourself the latest version of Branching Scenario or you wait until the H5P core team releases an update.

  7. Absolute total newbie! I love this idea! I have been making escape rooms for my elementary students using Google Slides and forms.

    I do have a WordPress class blog–how hard would it be to insert this code since these features haven’t yet been added to H5P?

    1. Hi Nancy!

      You are commenting on a blog post that close to two years old. The H5P core team has merged in the changes meanwhile that allow you to go backwards and to prevent progression for the content types that are included in Branching Scenario. I recommend that you simply use the official version even though it doesn’t feature “Fill in the Blanks” yet.

      Cheers,
      Oliver

  8. Hi,
    I assume you are using Branching Scenario, then how did you get to the number “The door is locked. And what’s this? ”

    Thank you for your attention

    Kind regards

    1. That was done by changing the code, which is very simple – see the post. The H5P core team has meanwhile adopted the option to go backwards, but not the option to add more subcontent types and tie progression to its outcome.

  9. Good morning,

    Thank you for having the time to reply, but that didn’t help much, I’m a starter and I can make isolated activities pretty well or in the same page, for ex:
    https://professortic.me/2023/05/12/expressoes-regulares/

    But if I want to follow one after the completion of the prior I simply just can’t seem to figure it out.

    How can I control in WordPress when [h5p id="16"] ends sucessfully, How can I carry on to the [h5p id="17"] ?
    and people cannot jump from one to another ?

    Thanks for all your attention.

    Kind regards

    1. Hi!

      H5P itself does not support chaining single activities in any way. Either there is a content type that bundles different other content types (such as Interactive Video) or the H5P integration (the WordPress plugin in your case) will have to offer such a feature tailored to the specific platform that H5P is running on. The regular H5P plugin for WordPress does not allow to chain single activities. One of the many LMS plugins for WordPress might, but that’s beyond my knowledge.

      What you see here is a demonstration of what Branching Scenario could do if the code was changed by the H5P core team, but that’s something beyond my control. The H5P core team is in charge of the code of Branching Scenario and I cannot change the official code base.

      You should visit https://h5p.org/forum for questions about H5P.

      1. Thank you so much Oliver, it confirms what I suspected,
        I’m learning moodle, because it controls H5P conclusion, but not as Youtubers claim !

        I’ve been using chatgpt and it gives me some tweaks for what I want, but I must be cautious on altering wordpress code,

        But it was great H5P team could do it on wordpress from [h5p id="16"] to [h5p id="17"]

        Nevertheless, as I advance I’ll be sharing here what I’ve been learing

        Thank you all 🤍

        Kind regards

  10. There are two different H5P integrations for moodle. One was created by the H5P core team and is a plugin, the other one was created be Moodle HQ and is included in Moodle automatically. Both should support completion tracking and thus be able to restrict progress, but if one of them has a bug, you should report it accordingly (to H5P Group if you are using the H5P plugin, to Moodle HQ if you are using moodle’s own custom H5P integration).

    I doubt that H5P Group is going to add that feature to the WordPress plugin, because WordPress it itself is not a Learning Management System (LMS) and respective plugins that turn WordPress into a LMS should be responsible for such a feature.

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