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  Aislinn 12:28 pm on February 11, 2015 Permalink  

  Feature Update – exponentials and updates to *video and *back 

  Here’s what’s new: Exponentials and square roots Share your program with custom-loaded variables Previous answers saved when using back buttons The *video keyword is now simpler Users alerted when their internet is down Tips for editing your program in GuidedTrack

  Exponentials and square roots Wow your users with your fancy-pants math skills. Calculate the power of a number using the ^ symbol (shift + 6 on your keyboard). Take the square root of a number by using ^1/2 or ^.5. The following shows some of the calculations you can do: Assuming that x is equal to 4 and y is equal to 3, the above GuidedTrack code would produce the following values: 16 2 2 0.25 64

  Share your program with custom-loaded variables Imagine this scenario. You have a GuidedTrack program that you want to share with the world, but you want to give slightly different versions of it to different groups of people. No problem. You don’t need to create multiple GuidedTrack programs in order to accomplish this goal, you just need to tweak the share URL a little bit. Adding a single text variable Let’s say your teenage daughter wants to start dating. You’re sort of okay with that, but you want each date to first take an extensive survey that includes criminal history questions and compatibility scales to ensure they’re a good fit for your little poodlesticks. You want to personalize it a little by adding a variable that uses their name every now and then, so they don’t think you’re weird. Rather than include their name as a variable in the program (which you’d then have to change for the next person who wants to date your daughter), you can add it to the URL like this: https://www.guidedtrack.com/programs/uniqueprogramID/run?name=Danny The wording in bold font is what you would add to the end of your share URL in order to ensure that the variable “name” is defined as “Danny.” Then, you just need to make sure your program uses this variable, with plenty of references like “Howdy, {name}!” Adding a single numerical variable The process for adding a numerical variable to your program is pretty similar. Here’s an example: https://www.guidedtrack.com/programs/uniqueprogramID/run?x=4 You can define x as any number that you want, including decimal and negative numbers. Just don’t use any commas. <h4″>Adding a single collection Suppose you wanted to do the equivalent of the following command, but through the URL: >> beatles = [“John”, “Paul”, “George”, “Ringo”] You just have to ensure you add brackets after the name of your variable, like this: beatles[]. You also separate each item in the collection using an ampersand. https://www.guidedtrack.com/programs/uniqueprogramID/run?beatles[]=John&beatles[]=Paul&beatles[]=George&beatles[]=Ringo Adding multiple variables Suppose you wanted to do the equivalent of this in the URL: >> x = 3 >> y = 4 >> z = 5 To do this through the URL, you’d separate each of the 3 variables with an ampersand: https://www.guidedtrack.com/programs/uniqueprogramID/run?x=3&y=4&z=5

  Previous answers saved when using back buttons When users press the back button, they’ll now be able to see the original answers they gave to past questions and they can edit those answers. This will make editing paragraph responses a breeze for users. This feature works whether the question type is text, paragraph, multiple choice, or checkbox. In the above multiple choice example, this user can see their original answer was “Going out” and can change it or keep it by pressing either option.

  The *video keyword is easier Before, you had to use a fairly particular link in order to display videos in GuidedTrack. Now, it’s easier than ever to add a YouTube video to GuidedTrack. Simply copy the video link from the address bar, or grab it from the share section. You can also customize the video so it starts at a certain time point or hides the video controls.

  Users alerted when their internet is down When the internet goes down, a small popup appears in the corner letting users know about the issue. They can still continue in your program, but all the answers they’ve given will only be saved to the server once their internet comes back on.

  Tips on editing your program in GuidedTrack Few people know that the GuidedTrack text editor is actually very powerful stuff. There are a number of special shortcuts you can use to become an editing ninja. For example, you can use Ctrl+f (Command+f on a Mac) to bring up a box that will help you find text and Ctrl+h (Command+Option+f on a Mac) to replace text. Pressing Ctrl + , (Command+, on a Mac) will bring up the text editor settings. Click here to learn more ways to be an editing aficionado.

   
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  Aislinn 1:30 pm on January 6, 2015 Permalink  

  Feature update – scatter charts 

  Scatter Charts There are now two types of charts you can make in GuidedTrack: bar and scatter. We’ll go over the latter here, but you can find instructions for making bar charts in the GuidedTrack manual. Here’s how scatter charts look: When users hover their mouse over any of the above data plots, a small box pops up with additional information. For example, if users hover their mouse over the 1993 data point, it reads, “First year of school.” (the above is just a static image, but you can try it yourself here). The code for this works similarly to bar charts. You need the *chart keyword and an optional title for your chart. You also need the *type keyword (in this case it should say: *type: scatter). Third is the *data keyword. Your data should be organized in this general format: *data: [[x1, y1], [x2, y2], [x3, y3], [etc…]] In our example, there are five data points. Each data point is surrounded by [brackets]. The value of the x-axis is written first (in our case, that’s the year) and second is the y-axis (e.g. centimeters). Commas separate the values within each data point and they separate data points from each other. Additional brackets surround the entire dataset. If you remember learning about collections previously, then this dataset can also be thought of as a collection of smaller collections. Variables can also be subbed in. The *rollover keyword is optional. If you include it, you must have as many entries as there are data points. The first rollover text, (i.e. “Toddler”) corresponds to the first data point (i.e. [1989, 100]), and so on. Rollovers provide additional text that users can view when they hover over the corresponding data point.

   
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  Aislinn 1:38 pm on December 3, 2014 Permalink  

  Feature Update – slider questions, collections, *email update 

  Here’s what’s new: Adding slider questions. Publicize your GuidedTrack code Collections Send an email to a specific email address Improvements in data syncing and a *wait update

  Slider Questions Now you can ask your users slider-style questions. Slider questions are a good alternative to multiple choice questions when the answer options are on a continuum or on the same spectrum. Simply write and indent “*type: slider” beneath your *question to allow your users to slide a cursor to their preferred answer. Slider Options There are two general types of slider questions: Discrete Continuous Plus, two bonus specifications you can make to your questions: setting a *min and *max value to continuous slider questions adding text *before and *after the slider bar Discrete With discrete slider questions, you specify what each of the options are that your users can slide across. Here’s the example that generates the image from above: In this example, users will see a question that says “Do you like bacon?” Beneath that, they’ll see a line running from left to right. They can slide their cursor over the line to see different options and choose their answer. The cursor will snap into place at each of the four answer choices. Continuous When no answers are provided to a slider, it becomes a continuous slider. Continuous sliders provide users with 100 numerical options to select from. By default, this range goes from 0 to 100. Here’s an example: This slider will flow freely along a continuum of 0 to 100. Mix and max keywords You can specify the range of continuous variables you’d like users to be able to choose from by using the *min and *max keyword. As an example: This slider will flow freely from 1 to 10. One hundred data points are possible, meaning users could put the cursor onto “5” or be as precise as “6.74.” If you don’t want users to have this level of precision, then you can use a discrete slider by instead indenting the numbers 1, 2, 3…10 beneath your question and removing the *min and *max keywords. Before and after text Here’s how your program would look to the user with *before and *after keywords added: Special text has been added to the left and right side of the slider. Here’s the code that made that program possible:

  Publicize GuidedTrack code You may wish to make your GuidedTrack code public, so that others can copy and improve upon your work. To do so, go to the “Share” tab of your program and then the tab “Who has access.” Then select “Public Code.” Now anyone who runs your program can also see the code and could copy it for themselves if they choose to. In this part of the program settings, you can also restrict access to your program to just a few “collaborators.” Doing this means that only you and a select few can edit or view your program.

  Collections We got into collections a little bit in our last post. You learned that when checkbox responses are saved, they’re saved in what’s called a collection, which could look something like this: You also learned that you can use the “in” expression to provide special content to users who checked off a certain item. For example, imagine we asked users to check off which pets they had and saved their responses as “pets.” If we then wanted to give a follow-up question to users who had checked off “Cat,” we could do the following: Remember, capitalization and punctuation are important when using “in” expressions. Writing “cat” in lowercase would not have worked. Now, we’re going to delve even deeper into collections. This functionality is essential for complex programs like the following: You want to store each answer that a user provided to a repeated question. You want to combine a user’s answers from two or more questions into one variable. You need to alphabetize a list of things You need to get the mean of a list of things You need to know the size of a list of things Getting and using a specific item in a collection Let’s suppose you have a collection of numbers that looks like this: We’ll pretend these represent a person’s mood scores (how they felt on a scale of 1-10) across time. Notice how collections can contain collections within them (as the third position in this collection does). For now, just imagine that the mood scores of the third position (4, 3, 5) are clumped together because they were all collected in the same day. There are several ways the program can use collections to interact with the user. You can simply show the user their collection: This would produce a line of text that looked like this to the user: You can also show the user specific entries in their entire collection. In our example, we want to show the user the first and second things in their collection: Users would see the following: You can also show users a specific entry of a collection within a collection: With the above code, users would see the following: Collection entries can be used similarly as other variables. For example, you can do the following things: In the first example, if user’s first mood score in their collection were a 7 or above, they’d see “You started with a pretty good mood.” In the second example, users would see as many smiley faces as their mood rating. In this case, they’d see 8 smiley faces. Get the size of a collection Getting the size of a collection is pretty easy. Using our earlier pet example, we could say: This would then say “You have 3 different kinds of pets” because our pets collection contained a dog, cat, and a small furry thing. Get the mean value of a collection of numbers If you have a collection of numbers, such as [10, 10, 30, 30], you can easily find the mean of the collection, like this: This would read as “The mean of these values is: 20.” Add something to the end of a collection Adding new items to a collection is pretty easy. If you have a collection called “user_badges,” you could add a new entry to the collection like so: The new entry, “Topped 1,000 points,” would be added to the end of the collection called user_badges. Now let’s use a more complicated example about a question that asks users to painstakingly enter 50 hobbies. Here, the collection is initially empty. First, we have to set up the collection that the user’s answers will go into. We’ve written >>hobbies=[ ] at the top. Initially, it’s an empty collection, but it will soon fill up with user data. Users will next see “Enter one of your hobbies” and can enter whatever they like in the box. Their answer is saved as the variable “newHobby.” Then, this variable is added to the end of the collection called hobbies. Since the collection is empty in the beginning, the first answer users provide will momentarily be the only thing in the collection. The user will next see “Great! Now add another” and the question will reappear. Users will repeat the process of typing in each new hobby for a total of 50 times. Each time, the variable “newHobby” will change to the latest thing they wrote and this thing will be added to the end of the user’s collection. When users are finished, they will see “Here are the hobbies you listed:” followed by all 50 of the hobbies they typed. You’ll notice that in the user_badges example what’s called a “text string” was added to the collection (“Topped 1,000 points”) and in the second example the value of a variable was added (newHobby). In all aspects of GuidedTrack, there are three different types of information you can store and work with: text strings, numbers, and collections. There are also variables, which store any of the three types. Here’s how a text string, number, and collection looks: Here’s how a variable looks: Insert something in a specific point in the collection When you add something to a collection, it gets added to the very end of the collection. But what if you want to insert something at a very specific spot of the collection? You’d do so like this: This inserts “lawn mowing” as the 3rd thing in the hobbies collection. Within the parentheses, the first part is always the thing you want to insert. The second part is the position that you want to insert the thing in. In this next example, the user’s answer has been added to the beginning of their collection. Sort a collection It’s pretty easy to sort a collection so that all the entries are in increasing order (a, b, c…1, 2, 3). Or, in decreasing order (9, 8, 7…z, y, x) Sort is also very handy for collections of numbers. It can be used to put all the numbers in either increasing or decreasing numerical order. Randomize a collection Similarly, you can sort the items in a collection so they’re in a completely random order: Combine two or more collections Let’s say you have two collections and you want to combine them into one collection. We’ll use these two as an example: In order to add the items of listB into listA, you’d use the following code: In the above example, listB would still contain its original 4 items, but listA would now have 7 items (its original 3, plus the 4 from listB). If you were to show listA to users it would look like this: Let’s imagine the variable listB didn’t actually exist. You can still add these new numbers to listA like so:

  Send an email to a specific email address You can easily add the *to field to any email. This will allow your email to be sent to anyone of your, or your user’s, choice. For example, this could be a great way to get immediate feedback about the program you’ve created: The *to field can also contain a variable. So, you could ask user’s their email address, save it as a variable, then email them some content from the program, should they want you to do that. Previously, you could only email users by having them *login to GuidedTrack.

  Improvements in data syncing and a *wait update You may have noticed some new pretty swirly things happening when you begin a program. This mesmerizing little graphic appears when your program takes a little while to load. It reassures user’s that your excellent content is on its way. At the end of your program, there will likely be a similar progress indicator. On its final screen, your program will briefly pause and display the below progress bar. During this time, GuidedTrack is ensuring that all the data your user has provided will be synced with the server. In the past, it was possible for some users to go so quickly through programs and close them so abruptly that some of their answers wouldn’t have been transferred over, which could lead to gaps in the CSV data file. With the new loading bar appearing on the last screen of your program, you will be assured to get all the data from users who finish your program. There’s a second way you can ensure users’ data is captured in the CSV. You can use the *wait keyword like so: Simply type “*wait: data” and the program will pause just long enough to store all the information it hasn’t yet stored. Data is stored periodically throughout your user’s run anyway, but this keyword may be useful in spots where users may close out of your program too soon. This allows you to control, at any point in the program, that the data is totally synced, whereas the automatic wait and progress indicator on the final page only ensures this sync at the end of the program.