🎓 Lesson 23: Capstone II — Build It in the All-New Captivate

🧭 A Sane Build Order

You could open Captivate and build slide 1, then slide 2, then slide 3, polishing each to perfection before moving on. Don't. That way lies a gorgeous first slide and an unfinished course. The professional habit is to build wide and shallow first, then deepen: rough in the whole course, then add polish in passes. This keeps you always looking at a complete course, just an increasingly refined one.

Figure 1 — A sane build order: set up, rough in every slide, then deepen in passes (media, interactivity, assessment, polish), saving as you go.

One honest note before we start: Adobe updates the all-new Captivate often, so a panel might sit in a slightly different spot than described here, or a menu might be renamed. That's fine — we'll name things in plain language ("in the toolbar, choose Components") and describe what you're doing and why, so you can find it whatever the current release calls it.

🆕 Set Up: Project & Theme

Open the all-new Adobe Captivate and create a new responsive project — the default for the all-new tool, which means your course adapts to phone, tablet, and desktop automatically (that's Lesson 7 at work). Give the project a clear name that matches your topic, and save it right away as a .cpt file so you have somewhere to save to from here on.

Before building a single slide, apply a theme (Lesson 6). Setting the theme first means every component you add inherits consistent colors, fonts, and styles — you're not restyling later. Pick a theme close to what you want, then adjust its brand colors and a heading font. While you're there, glance at contrast: dark text on a light fill, or the reverse, with nothing borderline. That's a free accessibility win you'll be glad you took (Lesson 14).

📄 Build the Slides from Components

Now the core loop, repeated for each row of your storyboard. For each slide: add a slide, then add the components that row calls for — a Text component for on-screen text, an Image component for visuals, a Button to move forward. In the all-new tool you build slides by stacking and arranging component blocks, and Captivate keeps them responsive as it goes. Select any component and edit it in the Visual Properties panel on the right.

On this first pass, don't chase perfection — get the structure of every slide in place with real (or placeholder) text, so you can see the whole course end to end. Here's what a near-final teaching slide from the running Fire Safety example looks like as you build it:

Figure 2 — All-new Captivate mid-build (a simplified mock-up, not a real screenshot): a teaching slide assembled from component blocks, with Visual Properties open on the selected heading.

Work down your storyboard, slide by slide, until every row exists as a slide with its components roughly in place. Don't add interactivity or hunt for the perfect image yet — those are later passes. When you can click through the whole thing start to finish, even rough, you've hit a huge milestone: your course exists. Save a version now.

💡 Reuse, don't rebuild. When two slides share a layout (all your teaching slides, say), build one well, then duplicate it and swap the content. It's faster and it keeps things consistent. This is the same instinct behind themes — do the design work once and let it repeat.

🖱️ Add Interactivity & Media

With every slide roughed in, make your second pass: bring the course to life. This is where your storyboard's Interaction and Visuals columns get built.

Interactivity (Lesson 8): add states to buttons so they respond to hover and visited, and build the click-to-reveal or tabbed interactions your storyboard called for. In the Fire Safety example, that's the "click each corner of the triangle to reveal" interaction on slide 3 and the tabs-per-extinguisher-class on slide 5. Keep it purposeful — every interaction should make the learner do something that serves an objective, not just wiggle for attention.

Media (Lesson 9): add the images your visuals column names, and any narration or video. Pull polished images and illustrated characters from the Assets panel (Lesson 10) to look professional fast. As you add each meaningful image, fill in its alt text right then — see the "Alt text" row waiting in the Visual Properties panel in Figure 2? Do it now and accessibility never becomes a separate chore.

After this pass, click through again. It should now feel like a course: things respond, images support the message, and the learner has something to do on most slides. Save another dated version — you're building a trail of restore points as you go (Lesson 21).

📝 Build the Assessment

Time for the assessment slides your storyboard mapped to your objectives (Lesson 12 and Lesson 13). Add question components for each question — vary the types so the quiz stays engaging: a multiple-choice, a true/false, a hotspot, maybe a sequence question for the P.A.S.S. order. Write clear stems and plausible distractors (wrong answers that a confused learner might genuinely pick), and add feedback for correct and incorrect responses so the quiz teaches, not just grades.

Then wire up the assessment mechanics:

• Optionally build a small question pool and draw a few questions at random, so retakes aren't identical.
• Add a results slide that shows the score.
• Set a sensible pass threshold and how many attempts the learner gets.
• Confirm the quiz is set to report its score — this is the data your LMS will track after you publish in Lesson 24.

♿ Responsive, Accessible & Saved

Your course is built. Before you call it done, make the polish pass — the one that separates a capstone you're proud of from a rough draft.

Responsive check (Lesson 7): use the device chips — 🖥️ Desktop, 📱 Tablet, 📱 Mobile — to preview your course at each size. The all-new tool reflows automatically, but automatic isn't perfect: watch for text that's too long on a phone, images that crop awkwardly, or tap targets that shrink too small. Fix anything that breaks on mobile, because a real chunk of your learners will be on a phone.

Accessibility pass (Lesson 14): if you added alt text as you went, most of this is already done — now just confirm. Check that every meaningful image has alt text, that narration and video have captions, that the tab/focus order through each slide makes sense, and that your theme's contrast holds up. Run through a slide using only the keyboard; if you can complete it, most learners can too.

Save a clean version (Lesson 21): Captivate project files are binary, so keep dated copies — fire-safety_v1.cpt, fire-safety_v2.cpt. Save the finished build with a clear name; it's the file you'll publish next lesson. Captivate runs natively on both platforms Win + Mac, so this same file and workflow work whether you're on Windows or a Mac.

🎯 Try It: Build Your Course

📓 Learning Journal

📝 Lesson Summary

🎉 What You've Accomplished

You just built a real, complete, responsive, interactive course — from a blank project to a graded assessment — in the all-new Adobe Captivate. Every skill from Parts 2 and 3 came together in one project that's yours. Two-thirds of the capstone is done, and the hardest making-it-exist part is behind you. One lesson left: get it out into the world.

❓ Common Questions at This Stage

🔭 Looking Ahead

In Lesson 24 — Capstone III, the finale, you'll publish your course as SCORM and HTML5, test the package, upload it to an LMS (or host the web output), verify tracking, share it — and then we'll wrap up the entire course and talk about where to grow next.

✅ Before the Next Lesson

• Finish and save a clean, dated version of your course All-New
• Do a final click-through to confirm the assessment reports a score
• Keep your Captivate trial or subscription active Trial / Paid — you'll publish next lesson

📚 Additional Resources

• Course Glossary — component, theme, state, results slide, and more
• Quick-Reference Cheat Sheet — the component quick list and accessibility checklist
• Captivate Help & Support — the official docs for the current version's exact layout