Cash Handling Exercise — Richard Washam

Fig. 1The Counting Change exercise. On the left, a tray of one, five, ten and twenty dollar bills next to pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. On the right, under the prompt Build change to $25.35 here, a bordered change area holding a five, two tens, two nickels and a quarter, with a Submit button below them.

I was asked to build an exercise for making change. The screen names an amount — $25.35 on the slide pictured — and lays out a tray of ones, fives, tens and twenties alongside pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. Learners drag bills and coins into the change area on the right until they have built the amount, then submit it.

A wrong answer comes back with a number. The exercise totals whatever the learner actually dropped in, tells them the amount they handed over, and asks them to try again. Someone who comes up a quarter short sees what they actually built rather than a mark against them, which puts the correction where the mistake is.

It sits in a cash management course covering opening and closing a register, counting cash, and making change. Storyline’s built-in drag-and-drop grades each item against a fixed target, which is not what this needed — the change area had to add up whatever landed in it. So it runs on variables and triggers, with custom JavaScript doing the arithmetic and passing the total back into the slide. That is what makes the wrong-answer feedback possible.