Diane's Blog

OK. Perhaps there weren’t that many versions…. but it was close.

The Design Process
Creating an animated, functional game in Flash was not easy. Flash doesn’t function quite like any other programming language I’ve ever used, and the available documentation for the tool is sparse. I would not recommend using Flash for most teachers without some serious training.

On the bright side, I feel I can give out quite a lot of advice about how to add sounds, stop sounds (not an intuitive process), show screens, blank screens, etc. Preplanning exactly what you want done is crucial in Flash, as in any other programming language – even down to naming conventions for movie clips, buttons and sound clips.

I found that creating short movies to test out subfunctions, then copying frames from the timeline worked well to implement new features. This was used extensively to dynamically call movies and sound clips.

Requirements for games

Sound, sound and sound. I had my students tape many of the voices in my game. I taped the intro and the end myself. The sound made such a difference to the end result! I did find, when I tested this with my class, that it’s very important to get several opinions on the words that are used. My students started popping out answers to the wrong questions when I accidentally asked “How many people are involved?” instead of  “How many groups are involved?” in the audio. Audio trumps the visual for young students. If they hear something, they tend to ignore what is written on the screen.

Sound files did take up much more space than I expected. Although sound is important, developers take care to remove any unused clips and to optimize the size of the sound files. They add up quickly in space used. My final demo was over 2.5M.

Overall Impression

My students seem to enjoy being part of the process and grudgingly admitted that the tool would be useful to someone new to model drawing and to their parents. I’m still waiting on feedback from the other teachers in my school. The initial impression is that they are looking forward to using the tool.

If they do like the tool, I’ll be implementing individual games for grades 2-6 for next year, with 5-6 examples in each game.

Biggest Fear

I sure hope HTML5 doesn’t make this obsolete!

Here’s the game!

The full page version of this is best. Click here for the game:

Model Drawing

Wow! Just getting an intro built is tough work! Here’s the boring first cut of Model Drawing 101….. just the intro.

I was playing around with what I thought would be the easiest part of my flash game – the cover – and discovered I couldn’t make text do what I wanted it to do. I ran across this tutorial and picked up some very cool techniques. This guy is easy to understand, and you can run the tutorial and pause to try it out as you go!

Enjoy!

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ross_tony/Animating_Text_01/video-tutorial.php

I’ve gotten pretty good at editing audio.If you go to my class website, you can see the result of a two week podcast exercise. My kids wrote, illustrated,and acted in this.

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

Well, this was certainly an interesting experience! I had such grand aspirations for this video… now I’m humbled.

A few questions I’ll have for next week’s class include:

1 – Can you hide a layer completely – or are you limited to just showing outlines?

2 – I frequently locked layers to work on a specific layer. A bit later, I was quite surprised to see that symbols had moved to rather odd locations. What can I do to stop this?

3 – Can you morph from one picture to another? Can you morph from one background to another? My morphing abilities are sadly weak. I am pretty good at exploding symbols!

But all in all, that was fun. This is a great marital test…. how long can your spouse endure the same song over and over?

Learn more about this project
Development Notes
This seems to work fine on my computer – but the variables start acting up the minute I load it online. (Try out the hundredths and you’ll see.) Once a variable acts up, all the variable boxes grow to ridiculous sizes and the game gets very hard to play.

After spending way too long trying to fix the quirky decimals, I started looking around to see if anyone else was having this problem. It came as little surprise that others were pulling out their hair over this undocumented feature. So, until next weekend, I’m taking a break.

Another difference between the online version (public version 2.0) and Windows version 1.4 is that the background for the home screen keeps shrinking when it goes online. Sure wish both products had the same compiler!

Comparison of Scratch to Gamemaker
A few years back, I taught a similar program called Gamemaker (http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/try) to middle school students. The kids loved it. They learned programming techniques and produced games ranging from simplistic to relatively complex.

Although I liked the colorful puzzle pieces in Scratch, I had a lot of trouble finding things I built. Gamemaker is more straightforward, and places everything in plain sight on the desktop.

Scratch isn’t 100% stable – several of the programs I downloaded hung my machine. I never had this problem with Gamemaker.

I also like the fact that in Gamemaker, you can have a larger playing area. Scratch i a bit limiting with the small playing area.

I do like the fact that Scratch gives the ability to share apps and embed them on your webpage. (If only it worked!) I’ll have to check and see if the latest version of Gamemaker has a similar feature.

I just couldn’t help myself and tried my first synth. Boy, do I have a lot to learn!

A few tips for would be synthers:

1. Quantity is not everything.
2. That being said, if you change angles of the shot, quantity IS everything. (Take lots of pictures transitioning from one side to another and one perspective to another.)

I managed to synth 24% of my photos. Had I still been at school, I might have gone back for more transitional photos. Oh, well, for now, this is what you get:  Buoyant Boats (by Cedar Hill Prep 5th Graders)

A slightly modified hike in Sedona, Arizona:

I’m starting to feel a bit more comfortable with this tool. It does do some strange things. I was really interested in cutting out this cute fella to add into my final collage.

I kept using the Scissor Select Tool (it seemed to do the best job cutting out individual items.) Unfortunately, it had a mind of its own. Every time I had just what I thought I wanted, in the next click, a lasso would appear cutting out half of the picture. Very frustrating. I ended up using the Free Select Tool, which did a much better job.

Another strange thing – I couldn’t find a way to flip just one image. When I flipped something horizontally, the entire picture – all layers – flipped. I got around this by copy the layer to another window, flipping it, and copying it back. Seems like there should be an easier way.

The pterodactyls floating over my husband’s head were created from the same image.  Quite by accident, I used the shear tool and gave it a totally new perspective.

I’ve been getting my students more and more involved in assignments through my classroom website. I’ve been posting assignments then assessing their responses. In addition to posted assignments, I always have a space where they can chat with me and with each other. It’s working out fairly well.

So what’s the problem, you say?

When I started, there weren’t many comments. I now have over 200 comments (for a class of 11 students)- and that number is growing rapidly. I needed to be able to do two things:

1. See on the sidebar who posted the most recent comments (great for Sunday afternoon panics when students forgot how to do weekend assignments)
2. Summarize – and then look at in more depth -  who has posted responses to classroom assignments.

I’ve come up with the ultimate solution. I added in three widgets to accomplish this.

Configuration Details

This is key. I found my biggest problem with setting all this up was in seeing how to configure the widgets and how the final product looked. I’ll post this information later today in a movie clip.

The Final Result

You can see how this worked out at http://blogs.cedarhillprep.com/grade5students/.  Be sure to look at the sidebar under “Who’s Been Talkin’”.

The page that shows individual, sorted comments is private…. but this is a snippet of what it looks like: