working with text

I didn’t invest as much time in the practicum on Saturday as I had planned.  Part of this was that it was somewhat of an ordeal to even get the powercord back from my office.  I didn’t realize that WFU would be hosting a triathlon that morning!  It wasn’t a big deal, though, I was able to find parking out of the way of the athletes, and I took the quick walk to the library to reclaim the missing equipment.

I spent most of the time working in Flash to learn how to work with text (static, dynamic, and input).  It’s okay working with static text, or even user entered text that just sits on the screen.  Making the text interactive is another thing.  Luckily, I was able to find out how to take user-entered text and have it output depending on what the user said.

The discussion boards found on Friday were helpful.  It was also helpful to talk with John about programming principles.

The goal was to create an environment where the user could enter in an answer; if it’s wrong, they could get feedback, and if it’s right, the  correct block shows the text they entered.  Once I figured out the principles associated with text, it was easy to apply them to the game.

I didn’t invest as much time in the practicum on Saturday as I had planned.  Part of this was that it was somewhat of an ordeal to even get the powercord back from my office.  I didn’t realize that WFU would be hosting a triathlon that morning!  It wasn’t a big deal, though, I was able to find parking out of the way of the athletes, and I took the quick walk to the library to reclaim the missing equipment.

I spent most of the time working in Flash to learn how to work with text (static, dynamic, and input).  It’s okay working with static text, or even user entered text that just sits on the screen.  Making the text interactive is another thing.  Luckily, I was able to find out how to take user-entered text and have it output depending on what the user said.

The goal was to create an environment where the user could enter in an answer; if it’s wrong, they could get feedback, and if it’s right, the  correct block shows the text they entered.  Once I figured out the principles associated with text, it was easy to apply them to the game.

12/1: time without the ThinkPad

Friday was a pretty hectic day, and I forgot to bring my powercord home for the ThinkPad!  It was nice, though, to have one evening where I wasn’t totally devoted to Learning Objects.  I spent about 45 minutes working on the ThinkPad until I didn’t feel safe running on such low batteries, then I used my personal laptop to read a little about how to use ActionScript 2 to work with user-entered text.

I suspected, at the time, that this would be challenging.  I had no idea that the “Truncation Feud” game would be as challenging as it was.  Luckily, I found several discussion boards that discussed different problems and solutions people had for various text issues, and it was very good research to have for working in Flash once I had power again.

If I were to do Friday over again, though, I would have brought home the powercord!

truncation feud

So, I have rough drafts of the first two games ready, but not much feedback.  I figured it’d be good to look at them with “fresh” eyes, so I took the night to set up the framework for the Truncation Feud game.  I haven’t actually finished that, but I have worked in Flash to include everything up to the first game (this is where I’ll need to know how to do some fancier programming).

It was a good review of some of the more basic features in Flash, and I’m getting much more comfortable with it.  I can definitely see the power in the software and the potential for some really cool applications.

The plan for tomorrow: try to figure out how to do the programming for dynamic text!

Flash, Learned (at least a little)

Tonight I finished a draft of the narrowing game!  With a little help learning some JavaScript principles from John, I was finally able to get Flash to cooperate enough to make the game work.

It’s not finished by any means, but the elements are in place, and I made my first (baby) program in Flash!

Tomorrow I’ll need to try to see what I can do for the Family Feud game.  I think it will be really hard to get it to interact with text the user inputs, but we’ll have to see once I get started.

On a related note, but not part of the practicum, Kaeley and I are attempting to use an extra credit quiz with our class this semester.  If it goes well, we might substitute well-designed standardized & open-ended quiz questions for some (most?!) of the homework assignments.  Anything to save time on grading (as long as we can still assess learning).  At a minimum, something like this can save the two of us ten hours of work time.  If five sections of LIB100 decided to implement quizzing instead of one assignment, it would save a minimum of 50 hours of time—giving the library back a week and a half of work time.   Anyway, I know it’s not a Learning Object in a traditional sense, but it certainly would have some LO-elements, and may make the class easier and more desirable to teach.  Another thing I’m thinking about in the context of this practicum.

two workdays in one!

I literally spent all day working on learning Flash.  14 hours.  I took the day off of work to spend some quality time with Flash Professional 8.

It was fun and potentially very useful, which is why I was able to stick with it.

There was a time when I thought I might want to be a programmer.  I had some less than stellar computer science classes along the way, and decided to focus on the humanities and social sciences instead.  Now I play in HTML and extremely surface level code. That background, combined with my background in philosophy (logic), made it much easier to teach myself some basic Flash than I thought possible.

Here’s what I learned about Flash:

1. Flash is easy!
2. Interactive Flash is hard (if you’re not a programmer)!
3. Getting Flash and Captivate to communicate is impossible!

Learning a new computer language or skill is very game-like in itself.  There’s a lot of guessing and experimenting with variables to find out just why the image won’t do what you think you’re telling it to do.  I don’t let myself have that type of time much anymore because I have so much on my schedule.  Taking a day off to see what I could learn really helped me re-realize the value in playing and experimenting.  It’s something I think I need to make more time for.  For example, taking the time to learn how to do some things in Flash will really save me time when it comes to putting the games together.  Captivate is just so tedious and time-consuming, where Flash seems to be much faster.

I also realized the value of e-books.  I found out that ZSR has an online book completely devoted to Flash game programming (Macromedia Flash MX 2004 : Game Programming by Murray and Everett-Church).  This was far more useful than most tutorials for the basics of Flash (but quickly got too complicated for what I need to do).  After the Murray/Everett-Church book helped me get acquainted with Flash, the built-in help guides were the most useful resource I could find.  Once John got home from work I could ask about JavaScript and coding in general, which helped me with the bigger picture of what I was doing.

So, the tangibles for today are a number of experiments.  My first “working” Flash
game was running a “book” into a “master’s thesis,” and the “book” falls off the page.  By the end, I was able to make two versions of a rearranging game, where in the end the program “knows” if the topics or types of text are in the right order.   I also made a beginning sequence (extremely rough) for the rearranging game.  Now I just have to figure out how to put them all together.  I thought I might in Captivate, but after two hours of trying, I figure that’s not going to happen easily.

I also heard from Susan today about Boolean Slots, so I made several updates there.

New materials are on Library 2!

more boolean and Flash!

I met with Kevin today, briefly, to get some feedback on  Boolean Slots.  He had a lot of good ideas:

1. Make the “start” button disappear after it’s clicked on each machine.
2. Remove some of the “reminder” slides.
3. Show dollar signs on score cards.
4. He made new score cards, so I could redo those slides. (This required more work in Photoshop to create versions of the coins with just one object.)
5. Change the dollar coin slides to be centered.
6. Add as much interactivity as possible.
a. Instead of telling folks about and/or/not in the beginning, use a matching game.
b. Instead of reminding folks of their score at the end, use matching games.

We’d also like to add interactivity throughout the game, so I need to think about that some. I’d also  like to add a reflective slide at the end.

So, I was able to make corrections 1-6 this evening. I’ll see what I can do about the other two tomorrow (I’m taking a day of PTO to get a lot done on this project).

Again, the major problem is the sheer number of slides.  Things that should take all of 30 seconds to fix can spin out of control to take an hour.  I’m still not entirely pleased with the quizzing slides, so I need to work on those tomorrow.

Kevin and I also talked about the other games.  The only way to really make them like we envisioned is to use Flash.  Kevin doesn’t have time to do so yet, and I have a lot of hours of practicum to work on, so he uninstalled it from his computer and I am going to see what I can learn and implement tomorrow and for the rest of the practicum.

Installing Flash was the biggest headache and the worst part is that I don’t know what was causing the problem.  I had to restart my computer at least five times and for some reason the final one took.  Several websites on Flash recommended taking the 8 tutorials that come with the program, so I’ll probably do that in preparation for the other games.  Hopefully we’ll see some progress tomorrow!