Drag-and-Drop
- Matthew Harrington
Drag and drop activities require learners to associate items - typically text and images - with drop zones on an image. There are typically three main use-cases for drag and drop activities - labelling, reconstruction, and categorisation. Labelling activities are by far the most common form of drag and drop exercise, anecdotally. In a labelling activity, the learner drags labels to the relevant places on a diagram:
Categorisation activities use drag and drop to sort entries into categories, such as columns or simple boxes:
Reconstructive activities are the least common, but most visual, and require learners to drag images into areas to complete pictures. This can also be used for processes (such as dragging the steps of a process into the correct order):
Regardless, the key parts of the activity are the items (the things that are dragged), the drop zones (the location that they need to be dragged to), and the background (the image or template the items are dropped onto).
Items are typically text or images, and they can behave in one of two ways - either remaining in the list for reuse, essentially copying the item, which is typically used for categorisation, where the category is dragged to the object rather than the other way around, or disappearing to allow the item to only be used once. Drop zones are typically defined as rectangles, while the background image provides context for those rectangles.
Drag and drop activities can be problematic for accessibility due to their reliance on sight and the motion of dragging and dropping an item requiring hand strength and manual dexterity. Fortunately, there are many examples of how to build this activity type in an accessible way, for example:
Mobile devices also commonly have issues with drag and drop activities, with commonly enabled gestures interacting unexpectedly with the action of dragging on a touch-screen, such as most commonly dragging down to refresh and blowing up the learner’s progress in the activity. For this reason and those above, despite being called drag and drop activities, it is vital that the activity can still be completed through means other than actually dragging and dropping, such as tapping to pick up items and tapping to place them, and keyboard controls.