October 2024 eLearning Challenge: Prepping for the Zombie Apocalypse 🧟

Are you hearing mumbles or shuffling of feet during the night? Do you smell something a bit rotten wafting in your windows? Have you observed any friends or neighbors with vacant stares and arms outstretched? While people often joke about the Zombie Apocalypse happening someday, that someday is now. The stumbling dead are rapidly spreading their stank across the world, and they want a taste of you.

Zombies have just one goal: Find new targets and make more ghouls. Anyone nibbled by a zombie will transform into a brain-eater, spreading the virus to once-healthy humanoids. Despite their slow stagger and low IQ, zombies are maniacally driven to consume human flesh.

Protect yourself and your loved ones from infection by preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse with the help of Zom-B-Gone Shelters. Our shelters become zombie-free bunkers you establish outside of the infection zone, providing you with a home base for survival and defense.

✅ The Challenge

At Zom-B-Gone Shelters, requests for prepper shelters have skyrocketed in recent weeks as the zombie infection rate has spread. When a customer purchases a shelter, it is installed at the buyer’s designated location. The structure itself has zombie-resistant qualities (such as being odor-proof, which traps all those yummy human scents inside), but it arrives empty.

You work as an instructional designer for Zom-B-Gone Shelters. Due to the crucial role prepping plays in stopping the zombie virus from spreading, your course will be assigned to new shelter owners who need assistance stocking their shelters and defending themselves from the undead.

After completing your course, humans with the will to survive will be able to complete one or more of the following objectives:

Determine the essential shelter cuisine to stock up on for surviving the zombie apocalypse (pro tip: Spam is the new gold, and Twinkies have a longer shelf life than most zombies).
Transform everyday household objects into zombie-repelling weapons (bonus points for creative use of garden gnomes or shower curtains).
Design booby traps to make zombies stumble (who knew a rubber duck could be so deadly?).
Master the art of zombie impersonation, complete with authentic groans and shuffles (warning: side effects may include uncontrollable drooling and an inexplicable craving for brains).
Cultivate a post-apocalyptic fashion sense that is both practical in disguising yourself from zombies and runway-ready (because who says the end of the world can't be fabulous?).
Demonstrate the delicate art of zombie brain removal and take them out of commission (like a piñata…but grosser and with less candy).

📋 Requirements & Constraints

As you design and develop your course, keep the following requirements and constraints in mind:

Interactivity & Content Presentation: Ideally, your solution will include decision-based interactions or scenarios to reinforce the skills being taught. Here are some ideas for how you might present your content and make it interactive:

Build a drag-and-drop interaction where learners create custom weapons by combining common household items.
Add hidden hotspots to the shelter to identify potential areas of weakness in the event of a zombie attack.
Build a tabs interaction providing details on meal planning and shelter nutrition.
Include animations and/or motion paths to enhance the zombie brain removal process.
Design a scenario-based interaction in which the learner must interrogate a prospective zombie and evaluate them based on smell, voice, movement, etc.
Integrate characters and provide clothing choices via drag-and-drop (similar to a video game character menu).
Include a slider to move a zombie across a scene to test the strength of your booby traps.
Use a variable to track the quantity or weight of items (food, water, etc.) stocked in the shelter.
Create a branching scenario for a final zombie battle where your decisions lead to zombie or human victory.

Authoring Tools: You are free to use any eLearning authoring tool you’d like; however, Articulate Storyline or Rise are recommended. If you’re new to Articulate Storyline, check out this playlist of videos to help you get started.

Visual Design: You are free to design the course in any way you’d like; however, it should demonstrate good visual design best practices with a cohesive and consistent use of font, colors, images, and graphics. If you’re new to visual design, check out this playlist of videos to help you get started.

🎨 Style Guide

To help in the design of your eLearning course, you can view and download the client style guide and brand assets below. You are free to use these to design a branded course template, or you can create your own design.

ZomBGone_StyleGuide.pdf ZomBGone_Shelters_assets.zip NewLOGOfiles.zip

📑 Reference Materials

As you design and develop your course, you can create your own content from scratch or source your content from the following references:

🏆 Submission Guidelines & Contest Rules

Once you're done building your course, you can submit it by commenting below and sharing a link to your finished project. If you’re using Articulate Storyline or Rise, you can publish and share a link from Articulate Review or on the web using Google Cloud. Along with a link to your published course, share a few words explaining your design decisions, challenges, inspiration, etc.

To be eligible to win the $100 Amazon gift card, your submission must be posted no later than Friday, October 25th, at 11:59 PM ET.

You can learn more about the contest rules and criteria here.

If you’d like to get more eyes on your submission and encourage others to participate in the challenges, you might also consider…

Writing a Blog Post: If you happen to have a blog or online portfolio, write a post about your submission and share it on social media. Make sure to link to it in the comments below for others to see!
Record a Video: If you want to share how you went about designing your submission, record and share a screen recording video (via Loom, Camtasia, SnagIt, or YouTube) to showcase and explain your process. And, of course, don't forget to share a link to it in the comments below!
Share on Social Media: If you’re active on LinkedIn, Twitter, or another social media platform, create a post to share your submission. If possible, make sure to link back to this page and tag The eLearning Designer’s Academy on LinkedIn or Twitter in your post.

💬 Give & Get Feedback

After you've shared your submission, make sure to review what others have submitted and provide constructive feedback. Remember, the monthly challenges (and this community as a whole) are meant to provide an inclusive and supportive environment. As you provide feedback, make sure to keep our Code of Conduct in mind.

As you work to develop your project, also consider sharing your work-in-progress for community feedback in our Get Feedback space here.

🎉 Challenge Recap, Submissions & Winner

Congrats to this month’s eLearning challenge winner, @Robert Kostecki, for his winning submission: Zom-B-Gone Shelters! 🎉

Check out all of the submissions for this month’s eLearning challenge below:

🙋‍♂️ New to the Design Challenges?

If you're new to the eLearning challenges, check out this post to learn how they work.