SBLi's greatest strength is its ability to dynamically change the scenario based on the user's progression through the problem or case study. The Builder software allows the author to easily achieve this through a simple process of constructing rules through a sentence like structure.
Prerequisites provide a means of hiding a location from the scenario user until another location has been visited, an item examined or an action taken. For instance, a field on a farm may not be visible in the Location window until the user has made a visit to the farm.
The dependencies are constructed in SBLi by using Prerequisite statements, which will appear in the box under Prerequisites. This powerful function allows you to set-up features as required as prior conditions to a course of study, prerequisites cannot be bypassed when in player mode.
Feedback
You can produce tailored feedback whether prerequisites have been met or not, for example:
Feedback if a location was visited or if an item was collected: You may wish to confirm that the user made the correct decision to visit this location or that this was an unnecessary visit.
Feedback if a location was not visited or if an item was not collected: You may wish to confirm that the user made the correct decision in not visiting this location of collecting an item - it would not have been useful - or to inform the user that not visiting this location or collecting an item was an important omission.
Two types of prerequisite are available:
- Location prerequisites
- Action prerequisites
In a scenario you may not want everything available everywhere, all of the time. Prerequisites involve making certain locations, actions or items to be available only when certain locations have been visited, actions taken, etc.
For example, you might want to add an action in a laboratory about testing water. However, you only want this action to be available if a water sample has already been collected. Therefore, you only want the laboratory water test to appear once the action "collect water sample" has been taken.
