Where does the time go?

Well, we've been back from break for almost 3 weeks now, so it's definitely time to update this. Class and lab have really started to focus on information we can use for the projects. In lab we've been learning a lot of code that will really help with our quizzes/activities/whatever we end up calling them. Most of the work we've been doing is for the project, so I'll just get right to that.

We started by talking about our original design documents, and refining them. We made some minor changes, adjusting dates, and eliminating some of our topics. We worked on our user interface, and agreed that putting our students right in the Flash environment would really help them get comfortable using Flash itself. We presented our paper prototype before break. After break we began work on our interface in Flash as well as our script. The interface is basically done, although the script has a bit of work to go.

We presented both of these to the class last week. This forced us to really think about what kind of interactions we would have with our users. Prof. Blank suggested that rather than quizzes, we should find a way to have our users demonstrate how to perform the actual task we are teaching. This would help our learners more than a straightforward quiz, but the coding will be much more difficult. If we go this route, I think we will more than likely have to cut the chapter on tweens. We'll see how this goes as we finalize the script for at least our first four chapters. It will be a challenge to do a good job with the interactions for the drawing chapter, much less the chapter on tweens.

So to sum up, the design part of our project is nearly finished. We will have our work cut out for us in April when we start implementation.