EXAMPLE : AS3 PROGRAMMING
At the Active Learning Initiative, we make educational games. Or, we have since I made Lewis Hine, our first attempt at an actual educational game, vs a simple flash interface to download PDFs or demonstrate some concept.
It started with a question, can we make something like the Pokemon picture taking game educational and useful? It turns out, if the topic is right, yes.
Continuing with my XML based workflow, and working with an illustrator to produce the scenes, we created a educational game that involves taking pictures. This works by using direct capture of the bitmapData of each image and creating a new movieclip that knows whether or not it is similar to the original photographs the drawings are based one. It does this through a simple coordinate system. These images then get put in to a virtual muckraker magazine that can get filled in then printed for further study or as reward for the students.
We’ve had great success with this product through early junior high,
with interest picking up again through high school. One of the more interesting things that has arisen is the interest in high schoolers to make something similar, or their own version of it. It gave rise to the concept of students making their own “products” using flash made tools to demonstrate their learning of materials and as a way of exploring higher level learning concepts.