How I build great learning.

Huge shoutout to Tim Slade and his eLearning Challenges! When I saw this challenge on his website, I knew it was one I wanted to participate in and try new things with. This was such a fun project to develop because the theme was outside the box — it gave me an opportunity to make something with a lot of humor and outlandish situations.

I knew I wanted to build this entire course in Storyline 360 due to the interactions, the audio/voiceover, and the graphics I wanted to use. I started by thinking about the learning objectives and how I could tell a story to achieve them.

Once I had my objectives, I decided the format should feel like on-demand training from a fictional company. The first few slides show zombies traveling from underground all the way to someone's house — using royalty-free sound effects and Storyline's AI text-to-speech for a high-quality narrator.

The training strikes a balance between watching/listening and interacting — clicking through and completing drag-and-drop activities toward the end. The crafting table was incredibly fun and let me use a lot of variables, and the knowledge check lets learners pass and earn "Zombie Survivor" status.

I came up with this idea because I coached tennis prior to getting into instructional design — I wanted to take something I used to do in-person and create an eLearning version. This meant I could act as the SME for the course, which made the research phase much faster.

I knew I wanted the course completely in Storyline 360 so I could leverage interactions and make it feel fun. I chose bright green and yellow as theme colors to give it that tennis feel.

I used Twine to plot out each slide and the build order. This course wasn't going to be an all-encompassing rules guide — rather a short, fun introduction to court layout and scoring, which are typically the hardest parts.

The most fun part — and the most learner-centered — is the scoreboard interaction. I used JavaScript/HTML/CSS to build it, letting the score react to two buttons for each player scoring a point. Learners get both a fun interaction and the ability to see points progress in a game as they see fit.

The coffee eLearning came to fruition after I realized I was terrible at making coffee at home. I decided to solve that problem through training, since it wasn't possible I was the only person having this issue.

I began by researching different brewing methods — and quickly realized the amount of information could fill libraries. So I narrowed it to just three methods and created something simpler: a microlearning experience someone could easily go through to learn a thing or two about brewing a great cup at home.

I started with storyboarding and branching out scenes in Twine to keep everything organized and make the build faster. From there, I needed high-quality stock photos for each brewing process and background — fairly time-consuming, as I wanted images that also allowed for interactivity within Storyline.

Creating the labeled graphics, slider interactions, and drag-and-drop were the most technical parts — but after completing one brewing branch all the way through, the remaining paths came together much faster.