December 11, 2003

Professor FCS (part 2)

Yes.. still teaching FCS here. Since it is such a new concept in Japan that you can actually build applications in Flash, the first thing that I have to get across to my young geniuses here (and management) is that Flash isn't for stupid animations anymore. Not in my department at least. With the app that I got out for the training (see a post below on debugging) it really opened everybodys eyes here that Flash is more than for crappy animations that just annoy you.

So I've started out by explaining how close actionscript is to Javascript and server side script for FCS is even closer. Which helped a lot because now they (hard studying youngsters) now have a springboard to jump off of.

Read on for more on this...

When teaching something from step 1, if somebody doesn't understand the concept of what you are teaching it'll be a lot harder to explain what's going on. For example learning a new country's language. If the teacher can find someway to show that this new language is somehow related to what the student is already familiar with (like English and Spanish maybe, but not Japanese and English... In a case like this, you would try to explain the blatant differences, best if you can find opposites) then the learning process should go along a little less painlessly.

Going on that idea, I explain some of the closer concepts to Javascript, and the concept of OOP which can actually apply to almost any technical language. All of a sudden a light comes on in my happy students little eye and she has now mastered (within two weeks) the basics of flash actionscript and has built a chat app, video recording, video playing (with scrubber), shared object saving, and mastered the basic concepts of the netConnection, netStreams and how objects, arrays, and functions work. Of course the concepts there aren't so different than other languages but I have never seen anybody pick up so quick on something. Mainly because Flash is not just a language, you need to design with it too. Name instances, figure out layers, and levels.

Hopefully soon I can get her (yes she's a she - this in line with a few comments on other blogs that there aren't many women in this type of work) to move into XML and also Remoting because we have it all here and I really want to get more apps out that pull in data from DB's.

Hopefully this thread will continue in a happy direction sometime soon. Will post then :)

Posted by Graeme at December 11, 2003 01:36 PM
　



Comments

Teaching is really nice :) I started teaching ActionScript for flash MX last month on the MM authorized training center. I have only 5 students and man its so funny to see them getting excited when you explain basic stuff such as movieclip control LOL

I hope i can teach fcs on the future. Like you said, fcs is a lot funnier that normal flash, also central is really funny, and flash remoting... eeeerrr... i guess we are just bored of the same flash stuff, uh? ;)

cheers

Posted by: Fernando at December 15, 2003 02:21 AM

Yes.. bored is a good word I think. I think it's the challenge that gets us moving. With live data and updates from agents and stuff there are a lot of things to think of which makes it tough.. but that's the good part. Suckers for punishment? :)

Posted by: Graeme at December 15, 2003 10:33 AM

Graeme, good of you. Laziness is a power of progress isn't it ;) ?
Regards, wonderyak

Posted by: wonderyak at February 17, 2004 03:10 AM