Flash Site Explorations

Studio Exploration - www.abcmouse.com

I chose ABC Mouse's Age of Learning’s production and creative team as my studio exploration. I use the program several times a week with my childen and have found the site to be very inspirational in showing what Flash based programming can do to create educational interactive programs designed for young children to be used with the help of there parents. The site is designed for young users to become ready to enter elementary grade school. The creative team consists of over "40 visual artists, designers, writers, composers, musicians, voice-over artists, and programmers" to create the site that holds thousands of "online books, educational games, puzzles and art activities." (www.abcmouse.com/about-us) From a user perspective the site is well organized and offers an amazing amount of games and activites to choose from. Through the use of sounds, music, reading, animated teachers, and your own self-created Avatar you become engaged as being part of the program both as the parent along with your child. This type of programming and design is very effective in achieving a fun user experience that helps the child learn through fun interaction and positive reinforcement by earning "tickets" that they can spend on items like aquariums, pets and even decorating there own "room". From a technical perspective I can see why it takes so many people and so much talent to create a site like this one. Mainly because you have to build it in a way that is so user friendly that a small child can learn to master a mouse, and a parent doesn't go crazy trying to teach there little one how to click, hold down and move a mouse all at the same time. (This happens in the exercise of working on a puzzle.) When creating this, the programmer would have to build it in such a way that the user dictates where the puzzle piece goes and then learns from the outcome whether or not the piece fits or needs to be moved to the correct place. This is where I can see the use of Action Script comes into place because it no longer is controlled by the designer but rather the user. Please check out www.abcmouse.com to see for your-self how much Flash can do!


Short of The Week

  The second website I wanted to share with you can be found at www.shortoftheweek.com. I thought it was a great website as students of Flash to be able to go and see what other programmers and designers are doing in the Flash/Animation world. It also has a great source of educational articles on current topics that will help keep us up to date in this fast paced field. It also offers a platform to display your work once you feel you have created something worth showing to the world. You can submit your short film through there online and process and hopefully if it’s good enough your film will become featured on there website. Check it out!