Pre-Production

Target Audience

The core target audience for this Flash application is students at third level or in professional training or adult learners of Computer Science, Web Development, Multimedia & Computing and other disciplines (that cover web design & development).

An understanding of HTTP and how it works is essential for web programmers so that they appreciate aspects of coding such as request and response headers.
It is also useful for web users and designers to understand the process.

Educational Goals

The goal of the application is to help people understand how HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol, used for communication on the web) works.
A Flash movie will be used to frame the lesson content in a way that allows visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners to interact in ways that suit them.
It will do this in a visual, interactive way that should appeal mostly to visual learners but also to kinaesthetic and auditory learners, to a lesser extent. This will be achieved by having different components and allowing the user to choose his/her own route through the learning experience.

The learning features of the artefact for each style are summarised here:

Visual: animated diagram that adds in the different elements step by step, allowing the learner to check definitions of terms they are not sure of as they go
Kinaesthetic: allowing the learner to click through to definitions of terms and to repeat steps and fast forward to next steps
Auditory: voice-overs will be included but can be optionally turned off.

Tools & Materials Required

At the outset, I attempted to work out what materials I would need.

Images

Web search for images – MS Galleries (http://office.microsoft.com/clipart)
Other web sites that allow images to be used under Creative Commons
Digital photos – which I will take myself, if necessary
Buttons – create my own with specific look & feel or use Flash library – probably use library for time-saving.

As I progressed through the work, I found that I got all my images from MS Clip Art Galleries, as these were easy to find.
I used some Flash library buttons and created some of my own as the need arose.

Sound

Intro music – if I get any inspiration for it!
Voiceovers – record my voice using my MP3 player. Use Audacity (freeware) to edit the sound clips.

Text/Content

I already had the information in different formats as I have taught this as a lesson several times. My material was in Word handouts and web-based lecture notes. It consisted of diagrams and text. I used these as content resources when creating the Flash movie.
I also used the web to check definitions and update my information, through sites such as http://www.wikipedia.org.

Movie Production

Flash Professional 8

Images

Use Fireworks to edit and create images if necessary

Schedule of Tasks

As I was going on holidays a week before the deadline for this assignment and I was tied up with another assignment in the month before that, I gave myself 2 weeks to work on the assignment.
My project management experience in the past was useful in estimating times. But I found that once I got going, I had to get into the actual Flash development sooner than I anticipated, as that was the best way for me to know what images I wanted and how I would layout the content. As I was on a steep learning curve and was keen to use Action Script, it was necessary for me to delve into Flash as early as possible.

In the table below, the shaded areas represent the days on which I planned to work on the tasks shown in the left column. The Estimated Hours are the actual time I estimated I would spend on them (as I wouldn't be working fulltime on it). It turned out to be more in the end - as I spent a lot of time learning how to do things in Flash.

Note also that I had to eliminate the quiz and glossary components due to time constraints – I was a over-optimistic as to how much I could do in the available time! However there is a glossary element to the interactive diagram – the user can click on underlined terms to see their definitions.

Task

Estimated Hrs

Timeline

Develop selected idea*

Work out a schedule

Produce flowchart including navigation between elements

Source images

Source info & write content

Glossary definitions

Quiz questions

Storyboard – sketch scenes

Break out scenes

Record Sounds

Take digital photos

Flash development

Testing Flash (& debugging)

Final publish & submission

Total

*I had been thinking about ideas on and off since getting the assignment brief. This is the time spent thinking more about the idea I finally settled on.