Creating a Meta Activity

This section requires photographs, illustrations or screenshots.

Overview

Within our Getting Started Package, you will find a Template folder. We have provided a template for the configuration file, which is used by the CLIO interface to set up the activity. We also include a content drafting template created in Microsoft Word that can aid collaboration when creating activities as part of a development team.

Options

Activity Configuration

These are configuration settings for each activity contained within the Meta activity. These Activities must be contained within the same Program as the Meta activity.

Property	Description	Expected Parameters	Examples
Activity	The Activity that we would like to use.	This field requires that you use the unique name for the activity (the name of the file located within the Program’s @Activities directory, minus the .json extension), as opposed to it’s friendly name.
Preview	The preview image to use for this activity.   This will override any preview image configured within this activity.	Image File
Description	The description to use for this activity.   This will override any description configured within this activity.	Rich Text

Drafting the Content

Download the template.

Open the provided Content Template for drafting the Meta activity.  First, we must decide on the basic descriptive information for the activity, such as the title, description, preview image and theme.  This information is required because it is used by the CLIO interface to properly display the activity.

Next, we can start to write the content needed for the Meta activity type.  This activity type will display clickable links to different activities, allowing them all to be open under the same activity.  This allows you to change the preview image and description of these activities, allowing you to create different contexts using the same activities.

For this example, we want to display a total of two other activities.  To do this, we can copy the template for Activity 1 and create a duplicate.  To keep organized, we can rename this duplicate to Activity 2.

For each activity, we need to define the CLIO Program and Activity that we want to use.  This is the unique identifier that is used for the Program and Activity, which is the folder name of the program and the name of the activity configuration file.  

We want to create links to activities in the “Getting Started” program, which has the unique identifier of “Default”.  We want to use the two Visual Thinking activities, named “prototype” and “types”.  For each of these two activities, we can provide different preview images and descriptive text.

Coding the Activity

This section requires a downloadable template.

The next step will be to take the content that was created in the Content template and begin to migrate it into the Configuration template.  We will need to open the provided Configuration Template for drafting the Meta activity.  This can be done in a plain text editor, but for the purpose of this manual we will be using jsoneditoronline.org/.  

First, we will be duplicating the necessary fields to ensure that we can enter all of the data that we’ve spent time drafting.  In our previous example, we decided to use two activities within our meta activity, so we should start by making sure we have enough activities within the configuration file.

The first activity is labeled as ‘1’, underneath the Content object.  If we click on the small box to the left of ‘1’, we can choose to duplicate it as many times as we need to create enough.

For our example, we would need to duplicate it once to have a total of two activities.  After this is done, we will need to rename the activity we just duplicated.  Currently, it will be named “1 (copy)”.  It is important that these keys be numeric and unique.  We will rename our duplicate to “2”.

We can now start filling out the empty fields for the activities we want to display.  Under the first activity, named “1”, we have the same information we entered into our content draft.

First, we can put the relative location of the preview image we would like to use into “Preview”, as well as our description into “Description”.  Just like in our draft, we will also be entering the unique Program and Activity names that are used by the CLIO interface.

Once you are finished, you can download the finished JSON file by clicking ‘Save’ and then ‘Save to Disk’.  This file can be copied to the Program’s @Activity folder, and the media can be copied to the Program’s @Media directory.