The best way for you to familiarise yourself with the authoring process is to use an example lab exercise. To keep it simple, we'll design a lab that starts to teach a student how to use Microsoft Paintbrush.
As advised previously, we'll spend some time planning our lab before we embark upon the authoring process. So, our bullet-point response to the questions raised are as follows:
- The purpose of the lab is to teach basic use of MS Paintbrush.
- The activity they will perform in the lab will be to draw a stick figure. As the exercise progresses, they will incrementally add additional aspects to their drawing. Each new aspect will introduce new functions of the Paintbrush program.
- The lab will be divided into three stages:
- Stage 1, the student will draw a basic stick figure.
- Stage 2, the student will add a hat and face to the figure
- Stage 3, the student will add a “bunch of flowers” to their drawing
- The student will only need an environment with a version of MS Windows that includes Paintbrush. A basic installation of Windows XP will be ample. Lab stages 2 and 3 will need to include a pre-drawn version of the starting point for that stage.
- Each stage will have a single resource that gives an overview of the activities and objectives of the stage.
At the end of each stage, there will be a "goal" picture, and these three pictures are shown below:
As seen previously, our sketch/skeleton of our lab structure looks like this:
It is highly recommended that you work through this entire example before trying to create an original lab of your own. This example will take you through everything you need to know to author WLab content. Once you have this grounding, you should easily be able to apply the procedure to your own content.
Let's go on and build the MS Paintbrush lab.