A branching scenario is a short interactive lesson where the learner faces a situation, makes a decision, and lives with the consequences. Done well, it is the closest thing to experience you can put in a browser. Done badly, it is a choose-your-own-adventure that sprawls to forty pages and teaches nothing in particular.
The difference is scope discipline. This guide walks through the process we see work across nursing programs, sales floors, and classrooms: one decision moment, two or three honest choices, consequences before verdicts. In ScenarioSplice the mechanics take minutes — the craft is in the choices.
Pick one decision moment. Choose a single situation where capable people genuinely disagree about the next move: the deteriorating patient, the angry refund request, the vendor email that smells wrong. If the right answer is obvious, there is no scenario — move upstream to the moment where it was not. One scenario, one moment; resist teaching everything at once.
Open a new scenario and keep the template’s shape. Every new ScenarioSplice scenario opens as a decision-tree template — intro, decision, outcome, and debrief pages already linked — so you edit pages rather than invent structure. Keep that shape: situation, choice, consequences, debrief.
Write the situation page. Give the learner a role, what they know, and the pressure ("the line is down; the supervisor is waiting"). Two short paragraphs beat six — every detail should either inform the decision or make it harder. Paste an image URL if a photo or chart carries the context faster than prose.
Give the decision two or three believable choices. Write every option from real life: the strong move, the tempting-but-weaker move, and — if it honestly happens — the genuinely poor one. If any option is a strawman nobody would pick, replace it with the shortcut people actually take.
Write consequences, not verdicts. The page after a choice should show what happens next — the customer’s reply, the next set of vitals, the supervisor’s reaction — before any judgment appears. Let learners feel the outcome, then explain it. Verdict-first feedback ("Wrong! The correct answer was...") teaches test-taking, not judgment.
Tag your pages. Mark outcome pages correct, incorrect, or partial — learners see color-coded feedback as they play — and use info for pages that carry facts rather than judgment. Use partial honestly: many interesting choices are defensible but weaker, and saying so keeps learners trusting the exercise. Put your rationale and debrief prompts in private facilitator notes, which learners never see.
Validate and play-test. Run validation to catch orphan pages and broken links, then play every path yourself on your phone — you are checking pacing and tone, not just plumbing. Recruit one colleague to play it cold; wherever they hesitate or laugh, revise.
Assign it. Click Assign to get a shareable link, then paste it into Canvas, Google Classroom, Schoology, an email, or a slide. Learners play in any browser with no account. A focused first scenario — one decision moment, ten to fifteen pages — usually takes thirty to sixty minutes to build.
Frequently asked questions
How many branches should a scenario have?
Two or three choices per decision point, and let branches merge back where paths would realistically converge. Unmerged trees double in size at every decision — merging is how you keep a scenario under fifteen pages.
How long should learners spend in it?
Five to ten minutes. Short scenarios get finished and discussed; long ones get abandoned at the second decision. If you have more to teach, build a series.
Do I need instructional design experience?
No. The decision-tree template encodes the shape, and the rules in this guide cover the craft. Your subject expertise — knowing which wrong answer is tempting — is the part that cannot be outsourced.
Can AI write it for me?
It can draft pages for you — the honest workflow is in our AI guide. You accept or reject every suggestion, and the premise, choices, and tags should stay yours.