Building a statement: "I Did This"

- [Instructor] When talking about the experience API, you will have heard the phrase, I DID THIS. It's not just a catchy motto. It's actually a perfectly viable example of a xAPI statement. It contains the three principle elements of an xAPI statement that must be present for this statement to be valid. Let's look at those three elements now. The first thing you see is the Actor, I, this the person or actor performing the action described in the statement. Did is the verb, this defines the action being taken, what did I do? I did it, I ran, I jumped, I played, I launched.

These are all verbs that define different actions that I can perform, in this case, I did. Now, what did I do? Well, I did this. This, is the object of the statement. This, is the target of the action. What did I do? This. I passed the exam. What did I pass? The Exam. I launched the course. What did I launch? The course. The object is the thing to which the action was taken or the target of the action.

Each of these three pieces are examples of the required primary constituent elements of a valid xAPI statement. If we look at an example, we begin to see how these are actually used in the statement and how they are defined within the statement. I did this, actor, verb, object. In this example we're defining the actor "Tom" using his email address. You'll notice the mailto: at the beginning of the email address. This is because the vast majority of the time xAPI elements are defined by an IRI or Internationalized Resource Identifier and the mailto bit is part of a fully formed IRI for an email address on the web.

There are other ways to define the actor and we'll look at these more in the next lesson. Then, what did Tom do? Tom attended. Notice how the verb is defined by the URL to ensure that there's no confusion over which verb we're using here. URL's are unique and we'll look at why that's important in the lessons on verbs. And what did Tom attend? He attended the xAPI Foundations course, of course. And again, this is defined by a URL. Let's take a look at another example.

Tom played the Caminandes video. So we went from, I did this to Tom attended xAPI Foundations to Tom played the first Caminandes Video. Three different examples but, they are all made up of the same three constituent parts, Actor, Verb, Object. And putting these together, we get a fully formed and valid xAPI statement. There are other bits we can add to the statement to make more of a statement and we'll look at some of those optional pieces as we move forward through the rest of this course.