Professor FCS?

I'm teaching FCS here at work now. We have too many apps that need live data, or video/audio work that I can't build them all myself.. and don't want to either. So it's on to the younger generation of quick and bright minds. I shall now pass down all my accumulated FCS knowledge so I can finally take a break from coding and coding and coding..

Though I do have to say, coding for FCS is a lot more interesting than just Flash apps. Just flash stuff might have a form or two, some buttons, maybe a bit of xml getting read in and creating a menu or something, but it just doesn't compare to seeing live data or whatever flashing across screen when you hook up. Everybody in their dog has created a chat app at least once, but very few have created a high quality chat app out there. When I mean high quality, I'm talking above MSN or Yahoo messenger. I'm talking redundancy, information messages if you're cut off, line is slow, extra options like emoticons or sounds that you can customize. But believe it or not, MSN and all other chat apps have that. What makes FCS a better chat is all that and you can design it, shape it, put your own logo on it, control it.. pretty much whatever you want. But that's another story that I'm sure I'll get back to soon enough here. I'm interested in getting out a few words on teaching.

When teaching people what you know, it's hard not to get frustrated when they "don't get it". You explain a concept of how something works, and they say yes they understand and you move on. Come back to it later and they are like "we went over that?"... and you're like.. "yes..." and time stops for a few seconds as you both think the same thing. "WTF".

SO, take a step back as to what you know and try to remember when you didn't know. Bring back from the far recesses of your mind that horrible feeling of being confused and lost when netConnection.connect() was mind boggling and you were wondering why you had to connect to the connection, stream, and SO. How come one doesn't do it all?? Does it mean I'm making more than one connection? At least that's what I thought a while back.

It's not so daunting a task I think. Take things slow, make sure you have a goal in what you want to teach. I have taken an approach of assigning tasks that I would like to see done. For example, a chat app that will show a list of the users, chat area, login area, and the fact that you can press enter or the send button to send a chat. NO COMPONENTS... damn them... Simple app eh? Or so you'd think. There are quite a few ways to get the above done, but which is easiest? best? most effecient and bug proof? Those are the keys I think. Then it just goes from there, we move on to video/audio. Play the vid, pause it, give it a playing bar that you can scrub on... things like that.

I'll try to touch more on my experiences of teaching technical stuff like this. I do have experience in teaching other topics, but this is my first for FCS. Should be interesting.