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!

Truncation Feud

truncation

Originally uploaded by lmpressl.

Tonight I spent three and a half hours with the other two games. One is a narrowing game, and one is a take on the Family Feud to teach truncation principles.

I spent a fair amount of time in Photoshop, manipulating images to make backgrounds for the games. After that, I tried to get a skeleton for the game, or at least enough to have an idea for how the game could flow.

The truncation game is particularly challenging because I’d like to have multiple “right” answers that have different outcomes based on the text the player enters. Captivate does not seem to have that ability. I tried the “short answer” question slide feature, but that is not particularly well suited for the game (if we’re trying to keep the spirit of Family Feud), and even though I knew the right answers, I could never get the game to say I had entered them correctly. I’m going to sit on this over night and think about what to do a little bit more.

The narrowing game isn’t much better at this point. Originally Susan, Kevin, and I had discussed replicating the “ice breaker” we use in LIB100, letting users “slide” cards around on the board to show the topic from narrow to broad or vice versa. Again, Captivate doesn’t appear to let you have that much control. I think you actually have to use Flash to get that type of functionality. Instead, I’m trying to make due with the “matching” question slide, which again, isn’t exactly right.

So, I’m going to let those percolate over night, and hopefully figure out something by tomorrow after work!

narrowing your topic

narrowing your topic

Originally uploaded by lmpressl.
I am behind in my practicum work, so though we haven’t gotten together to talk details about the “narrowing your topic” game, I wanted to put together an outline. So, today I spent about three hours working in Captivate, learning how to ask interactive questions, and applying what I learned to the “narrowing your topic” game. Tonight I plan to smooth it out a little bit. It’d be nice to have a rough draft ready for my meeting with Susan and Kevin tomorrow.

It was good for me to do a little undirected work.  Without the pre-planning, it feels more like playing, and surprisingly, I got a lot more accomplished than I typically do in 3 hour bursts.  Perhaps it’s because I don’t feel like I’m wasting time since the plans are so open-ended at this point.