Teaching flash in IT college
Last week I gave a flash developers course in IT college. It has been over four years since the last time I stood in front of a class so it was exciting to be back . The subject was flash development and the whole course was made up of 8 presentations and 15+ hours of practical work.
I made all presentations and practice materials from scratch as so much has changed in flash world since the 2004. Preparing materials was a huge amount of work but it should pay off as I’m going to teach this course again in autumn and after that its just minor tweaking.
The whole course focused on single practical task – to create a full flash website for a fictional real estate agency “Magala”. Through this flash page students learned how to structure pages and navigation, how to make the content and navigation dynamic, animate with actionscript, encode and present video and how to communicate with php by sending image of user drawn sketch to email.
I think the course went well for the first time with new materials. On the first day there were problems with estonian keyboard and flash CS3 running in virtual machine. We couldn’t use curly braces in flash script editor panel and had to switch to external text editor of windows choice – notepad. The other thing I noticed was for students with design background and minimal knowledge of real programming languages (java, C#) writing actionscript to classes and therefore importing all display objects, events, net connectors etc was real problematic and hard to understand. So after one example actionscript class we wrote everything to frame and avoided error prone syntactic sugar as much as possible.
On a side note yesterday the insideRIA online magazine published an article of how teaching is a real win/win for personal and education growth… I do agree and sure recommend it.
You can check the final real estate homepage here:
