Flash in the Valley: Creating Mathlets with Adobe Flash

Flash in the Valley: Creating Mathlets with Adobe Flash

Registration Fee: $325 by April 28, $450 after

Educators interested in developing interactive, web-based learning materials have an exciting and powerful tool in Adobe's Flash Professional programming environment. Many websites use Flash applets to facilitate multimedia effects and user interactions. However, most books on Flash development are not written with educational applications in mind, and most do not emphasize the power of programming in Flash's ActionScript language. This workshop addresses both of these issues.

The workshop will offer hands-on training for educators and software developers in the form of demonstrations, lab sessions, and supervised projects.

Participants will learn how to manage basic user interactions such as text input and output, mouse clicks, and dragging objects on the screen using the ActionScript programming language. All interactions will be presented in the context of examples focusing on calculus and discrete mathematics instruction. Participants will also develop learning objects for an area of mathematics in which they have special interest, and these projects will be shared at the end of the week as both presentations and additional resources for the other participants. Because of the short timeframe of this workshop, we strongly recommend that participants have some previous experience with a modern programming language like Java, C++, or others. Previous projects and sample materials can be reviewed at http://webspace.ship.edu/deensley/prep2008/. New this year is the availability of a limited number of spaces in the workshop for more experienced Flash programmers who would like to develop more ambitious projects during the week.

Workshop fees cover room and board on the campus of the Shippensburg University in the scenic Cumberland Valley of south central Pennsylvania. Each participant who qualifies for the Adobe Educational Discount will receive the most recent version of Flash so that development can continue after the workshop is over.