Pinhole camera

Can we do it?
110 Cameras
110 Pinhole Camera Blueprints

Tatsuya's project

Tatsuya is a 5th year student working on his graduation project. He is going to use Flash to create an interactive presentation about New Zealand with a focus on exploring English. He's asked me to help and I was glad to offer my help, but I don't know if I can be of much use to him. He wants to do a lot of action script writing, but he's frankly way ahead of me.

I guess I'd better start studying action script quickly.

Audio project wrap-up

I gave the kids the first period (45 minutes) to finish their musical compositions. I doubt any of them finished their work, but that's alright. I didn't have a very clear idea of how I was going to assess their remixing skills and now I'm left with a problem. The kids spent 135 min on their projects and I can't easily grade them. How would you (quantitatively) grade a project like this?

I had then planned on letting them answer three questions based on the project and had them answer by posting responses on their class website. Unfortunately, a lot of them lost their questions and had problems with posting their responses. The problem could have stemmed from their servers, our internet connections, or the laptops. Next time, have the Ss open WordPad or someother text editor and copy and paste their responses when they were finished. That way if they weren't able to finish, they could just save the file in the (Y:/) drive.

I showed them a "real-world" example of remixing, ala DJ Q-bert. Unfortuately I didn't have the time to run through the listening exercise. I guess I can save that for next week, when I start the next unit of their semester: photographing? Where am I taking this class?

Flash Applications

Looking at the tutorial files for creating a Flash application, I had the idea of making one to provide grading based on a curve. Currently I'm using a Texas Instruments 82, or something like that, to do my grading stats. It would be wicked cool if I could make an application to handle those stats instead.

Flash resource extractor

I'm looking to find software that will allow me to extract vector art, images, sounds, etc. so that I can use them in my classes. It would make my job a hell of a lot easier, allowing me to "borrow" professional level stuff for my lessons. I think this would help intrinsically motivate the Ss by offering them interesting components to use in their projects.

Here are some possibilities:

• Flash Toolset
• Flash Utility
• FlashDigger Plus
• ActionScript Viewer
• WinSWF Extractor
• Gordon for MacOSX

Family ties

Bruce was talking about using cards and having the Ss make family trees. I was thinking that Ss could work in pairs to construct a family tree together by following an example made on the board or possibly with PowerPoint.

The teacher would have magnetic pictues of different family members and they would be put on the board sequentially while eliciting responses from the class regarding their title.

This would be a good first day activity. Go over the question forms as well:

• How many ___ does she have?
• Who is her ___?

Another idea is a card game with four cards to a suit. The different suits are different families. Students have to somehow match up suits by asking questions to the other students. Yeah, right. Well, this idea still needs a lot of development I guess.

This week's gotta do!

1. have Flash installed on computer 4
2. can Flash import audio on laptops?
3. ask to have newest version of Quicktime and Windows Media Player installed in the lab
   

Next Flash tweening project

What am I gonna do?
Last week wasn't a total waste, but it sure could have been better.

I showed them the basics of tweening:

• frame animation vs. tweening
• what is tweening
• position, size, rotation, and skew tweening
• motion path guide layers
• color tweening
• symbols, shapes, etc.

Now I need a cool project idea and I need to assess their knowledge of the above mentioned topics.

Well, I can try again to use Captivate to make a quiz. I know that it can do it, but I'm not convinced how well it can record and send scores to me.

As for the project...

• motion & shape tweening
• text
• imported objects
• student designed objects
• layer management
• at least three seconds in length

Goals: The students should be able to...

• create a Flash movie that runs for 30 seconds
• combine their skills using motion tweening of position, size, rotation, skew, easing of shapes, graphics, and text to animate objects in their movie
• set custom motion path guides in their movie to describe how objects should move around the canvas
• animate color and shape changes using shape tweening
• compose a project based on some kind of concept that improves the Ss English skills

Can the Ss import sound, objects, and images? Test it out!


Have the Ss create an animated web banner. Check average web banner sizes. Think of content. Banners are used to advertise something. It let's people know about something that is going to happen or something that people should buy. Find examples of banners. Can you download them? I guess you can simply show them using the web. You'll have to make a banner advertising something as well. What about links?



What is a symbol?
What can you motion/shape tween?

• shapes
• text
• lines
• movies
• graphics
• buttons

Cover the range of possibilities with a check list-style worksheet that visually shows what Flash can and cannot do.

Horrible lesson plan

I ran through "tweening" with my fifth year computer class yesterday. It's one of the coolest parts of working with Flash and arguably one of the most important. Yet, all I had them working with were circles and squares. The materials didn't even cover shape tweening, although I had them do some of that as well.

Next time, I gotta find some cool objects for them to work with. Better examples and more structured worksheets. I'm really not happy with my walk-thru's, but that's for a different day.

Looking back

Wow, it's been almost a year since I've contributed to this blog. It get's hard to juggle all of my blogs around. They are useful though.

I'm just about to begin working on the music video PowerPoint projects with my fourth year computer class. I'm looking forward to seeing what this year's group will do.

I've begun a new class with the Computers and English fourth year class. A challenging, but fun class to say the least. We're working on remixing audio loops right now to learn about expression through sound. It's expectedly taken longer than I initially had planned for.

The fifth year computer guys are working on Flash projects using the new Pro version 8. We're only just scratching the surface in this class.