Clicker 5-based Products FAQs

Look here for help with Clicker 5-based products and Goodies. Further answers may be found on the Crick Software, Inc.® web site if the problem relates to the functions of Clicker 5® rather than the specific Learning Magic activity. Click here to go to the Crick Software Technical Help section.

Q. I added a video from my digital camera to a cell and set the cell to play the movie. But it won't play. I just hear the sound, but no picture. This is Clicker 5 on Windows.

A. First, is this a QuickTime movie? Unfortunately, Clicker 5 on Windows does not play QuickTime. You will have to convert the movie to .avi using an editing program.

If the movie is already .avi, have you installed a codec? You must download and install a codec that is not standard in Windows in order to have the movies play. Click here for information on how to download the codec. Usually installing the codec solves the problem.

However, we have seen .avi movies that still will not play. There are many subcategories of .avi, and some are not recognized by the codec. Again, conversion is the only answer. We know, for example, that .avi movies saved using Indeo compression will run in Clicker 5 Windows, and you can also try other .avi compressions. Unfortunately, Indeo .avi's will not play on Clicker 5 Mac, which uses QuickTime and will play any movie QuickTime can run.

One other problem we have seen is that if your video card and/or system are old, the codec may not be recognized by the system, and in that case, even with the codec, movies will not display.

Q. Sometimes we see an error message in Clicker 5. What should we do ? A screenshot of it is included.

A.We have also seen this error message at times, and have reported it to Crick Software. If you want to report it, be sure to click the View Log button and save the log before quitting. If you click "Continue" things seem to work okay from then on.

Q. Is there a trick to setting up integrated study units like the ones in your Wonders CDs?

A. Yes, we have used several advanced features of Clicker 5 to create units like the ones on the Wonders CDs, and also the Goodies mini study units. These tricks let us link several gridsets together using a launcher as a start up menu. Here are the basic steps.

1. Navigate to the Clicker shared files folder. The full path is: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Clicker 5 and if you need more help finding this, follow the steps in the Install LM Clicker Goodies document.

2. Make a new folder. Give it a name for the study unit, and place a ! as the first character. For example, !My Study Unit.

3. Open your new folder. EVERYTHING in the unit must be saved here, and never saved anywhere else, to preserve links. But once you have all the files saved and linked in here, you can move the entire folder anywhere.

4. Use a graphics application to make a small graphic, 100x100 pixels, and save it as a png file named app.png. Put a copy of app.png into the unit folder. When Clicker 5 sees a folder with the ! in front, it knows this is a unit folder, and it will look for app.png inside the unit folder. The app.png graphic will be used instead of the usual folder icon for the unit folder. Note: This step is optional, because Clcker 5 has a built-in generic app.png and will use that if you choose not to make a custom one.

5. Make a new, non-sending gridset with one grid. Save it as start.clkx (format: Clicker file) into the unit folder. This is very important! ALWAYS check that you are saving into the unit folder!

6. Create and save the gridsets for your project into the unit folder. If you want to make sure students don't change the original, use the pull-down menu to save each gridset as a as a Clicker template (.clkt).

7. Open start.grid (the file you created in 5 above), go into Edit mode, and add a cell for each connecting gridset in the project. Right-click each cell to open Cell Properties. You can put some art into the cell to identify the gridset it will link to, and give it the name of your linked gridset as the text caption. Still in Cell Properties, click the Open Grid tab. Navigate to the gridset you want to link. Set a link for each cell. Then carefully save start.clkx back into the unit folder.

8. Add a cell to the starting grid of each set that needs to link back back to start.clkx. Set a link to start.clkx in the same way as described in 7 above. Be sure to save the gridset again into the unit folder, and use the pull-down menu if it is a template file.

In summary, a unit folder has ! as the first character in its name, and inside it are a custom icon graphic called app.png (optional), start.clkx (the launcher menu), and two or more gridsets (either clkx or clkt format). If you are using linked libraries, the folders for videos and sounds, and for photos, would also go into the unit folder before you register them and begin linking items. Always save into the unit folder! See the Clicker 5 manual for details on registering and using linked libraries.

Q. I copied the gridsets from one of the Goodies into a folder on my hard drive. When I opened the start grid, the buttons didn't work. Some of the movies and pictures are missing from the other gridsets. What is wrong?

A. The study units in The Wonders and Magic of Nature, and those in the mini units posted as Goodies, have links between gridsets and also many linked movies and photos. The movies and photos are in separate library folders. Therefore, you MUST move the study unit as a whole, copying and pasting the outer folder with everything for the unit contained within it to your hard drive. Any other procedure will break the links.

To understand why this is so, let's consider a cricket living in a closed jar. The cricket soon learns where things are inside the jar, but it has no information about the outside world. You can move the jar all over the house, and if you are careful, nothing inside the jar will roll around. So the cricket's information, his links, are still good. The jar itself is portable, like the outer folder of a study unit.

Therefore you can move it onto your hard drive from the CD, or download it from the Learning Magic server without breaking any links. The full address path changes, but the linking buttons only look at what is inside the outer folder (the world inside the jar) , and that part is still the same, so the links hold.

This type of linking is called relative addressing, and it is the same system as that used in web pages. In fact, if you could look "under the hood" of Clicker 5, you would see that it is constructed just like a web page.

If someone opened the jar and the cricket got out, it would realize there is a whole big universe out there! Until it formed a new set of links, it would be lost and confused. If you copy individual grdsets, folders, or other files from inside a study unit to a location on your hard drive, you let the files "know" about the world outside that outer folder.

The links would break, because the files now look at the entire address for each item, right up to your computer name, and that new address is certainly not going to be identical to what it was on the CD. If you copied all those individual files into a new folder, and went into edit mode, and remade every link, the study unit would work once more. But it's much easier to just be careful to move the entire "jar" without disturbing the files inside.

Q. Can we edit or modify the gridsets in a study unit?

A. Yes, but you must be aware of the linked files, and take care that you do not break the links. So long as you save into the original study unit outer folder, with the exact same file name, links should hold. CAUTION: Check the file extension to see if it is a Clicker file (.clkx) or a Clicker template file (.clkt) before you save. Use "Save as" to open the file dialog. Navigate into the outer folder for the study unit you are changing. The folder name should be in the slot above the large window within the dialog.

By default, the file dialog is set to save as a .clkx file. If you do NOT see the gridset title you are saving, and you have double-checked that you are in the right outer folder, then the gridset you are saving is a template (.clkt). Click and pull down the menu just to the right of the gridset file name, and you will see the option Clicker template. Choose it, and you should then see more file names in the window, including the one you are saving. Go ahead and save.

SUGGESTION: You might want to make a copy of the entire study unit, and do your edits on the copy. You can even change the title of the outer folder (i. e., !Exploring the Desert 2) without disturbing the links. But do NOT change any names within the study unit outer folder! Working on a copy will save having to go back to the CD and reinstall, and it's also a way to have copies customized for various students.

If you keep these cautions in mind, you should be able to make edits such as changing the wording, adding more words to the LM Wordbank, changing the text size, color, and/or background, etc. A document detailing the process of saving edited units and making various changes is included on each CD and with each Goodie, or you can download it here.