Some interesting problems there. I too played around with this last weekend and got something to work on the basis that the correct answer would pop up as soon as entered without the need for a separate button or a timer (except as an ultimate timeout).
But trying to do it without the equivalent of an <Enter> key, and having to cater for answers which might be one, two or more digits, made the whole thing extremely complicated and I began to lose the will to live. I also found - not for the first time with Interactive Designer - that what worked with literal figures didn't work once they were replaced with variables.
I was really pleased with your initial suggestion, Matthias, that you could give the input box the focus simply by selecting the nonexistent contents of it. There doesn't seem to be a function in Interactive Designer to detect a keystroke, and a hidden input box or one which can just stay on the pasteboard seemed an ideal solution for that.
It's therefore puzzling and a great disappointment that this doesn't work within a browser - it's just the same for me with my version in both Firefox and IE. Do you think there's a way around that? (In Cliff's case, it doesn't really matter as presumably the .swf can simply be opened with Flash player with or without a standalone .exe)
Are you doing this simply by comparing the input number or string with the answer after the five seconds, or have you used a routine to detect the keystrokes as they are entered?
Doing it without the equivalent of an <Enter> key or a timer does seem to add an enormous layer of complication in the scripting, and without knowing the first thing about educating youngsters, I do wonder how important that is. We normally expect to see our input as it goes in, and in every walk of life we have to press the <Enter> key to show that we have finished entering something. How can we be sure we have keyed our answer as intended if we can't see it, and how can we see why our answer is wrong if it is wrong?
On the other hand I do see the merit of not having to click on the box in the first place and not having to grab the mouse in order to click an 'I have finished' button. Is it possible to detect the use of the <Enter> key, as distinct from a separate button, after keying in the answer, so that it can then be evaluated immediately?
Sorry if I have thickened the plot!
Darrell
PS Has someone been tinkering with the forum stylesheets? I now have no divider line between posts in Firefox, although they're still there in IE.