This final week of the course was entirely focused on completing my project, JLPT: N3 Assessment Quiz. There were no new assigned readings for the week, and given the intensity of finalizing my work, I also did not have enough time to meaningfully reflect on the Week 1 reading on Constructionism. Most of my energy was devoted to overcoming the last technical challenges and ensuring my project was ready for submission by the deadline.
Looking back, this project truly pushed my skills in both educational technology and instructional design. My original goal—to create an assessment module focused specifically on Japanese vocabulary and grammar at the JLPT N3 level—remained constant, but the process of getting there involved major pivots and adaptations.
Among the biggest challenges were the technical barriers I encountered with Adobe Captivate:
Japanese text corruption (mojibake) forced me to rethink how I entered and imported my quiz content.
CSV encoding issues initially caused significant setbacks, but once I learned to save my files in UTF-8 format, I was able to preserve the integrity of my Japanese characters.
Text formatting limitations made it difficult to replicate the underlined question prompts common in JLPT exams, requiring a compromise where I highlighted text instead of underlining it.
Project scope reduction became necessary when I realized that handling hundreds of questions individually in Captivate was not realistic given the tool’s limited batch editing functionality. Scaling down to a 50-question pool was the right call for both manageability and learner experience.
Quiz retake functionality posed an unexpected problem due to how Captivate handles random question pools. With time constraints, I ultimately implemented a browser refresh workaround, ensuring that learners could restart the quiz without completely breaking the module.
While these issues were frustrating at times, each one offered a chance to practice real-world instructional design problem-solving—something no textbook or course reading alone could fully teach. In many ways, the challenges mirrored Constructionist ideals: learning through building, iteration, and making mistakes in a "hands-on" environment.
Even though I wasn’t able to revisit Constructionism in depth this week, I can clearly see how it has played out in my own experience. Through actively designing, troubleshooting, and revising my project, I constructed knowledge and skills that are now embedded far more deeply than if I had only engaged with theory.
Publishing the final product to my GitHub Pages site (https://hnm73.github.io) also felt like an important milestone—transitioning from a personal project to a publicly available resource. Although my quiz module should still be complemented by broader JLPT study materials (as noted in my disclaimer), I believe it provides meaningful, structured practice aligned with N3-level expectations.
Ultimately, I’m proud of the work I completed under the time and technical constraints, and I feel much more prepared to tackle future instructional design projects that involve multimedia, complex language sets, or assessment development.