Technology Notes

Yesterday was the fourth meeting of the Physical Computing class I’m taking… every week gets more and more exciting!! We’ve learned how to manipulate the basic tools, create simple animations using the timeline, use action script (very, very basic though), and make buttons. I guess that might not sound that exciting, but these basics are going to lead to bigger and better things…. We had some time to mess around and try to create a scene, so I tried to recreate the ‘chute’ scene one of our instructors created…. Take a look!!!

Yeah, it doesn’t look that great, but it’s the concepts that count!! Using what I’ve learned so far I’m going to try to make a ‘real’ project this weekend that I plan on using in my senior PreCalculus class. In class today we worked on what I thought was a pretty straightforward word problem— however, instead of spending about 5-10 minutes on it, we wound up spending almost the whole period discussing it/working on similar problems. The problem involves a beaker of an acidic mixture in which x amount of pure acid needs to be added in order to achieve a set percentage of acid in the solution. It hit me that I could make this problem so much easier for them to visualize by using a flash movie instead of static images….. I can totally visualize what I want to happen in the scene, but I think it’s going to take a little bit of work to make it actually happen. We’ll see what I can do this weekend!! Between online tutorials and being able to contact our instructors via email for help I think I’ll be able to pull it off…… so hopefully next time I write I’ll be able to share a much cooler scene than my ‘chute’ movie!!!

Part 2:
Working with the timeline is starting to make more sense, but it’s still a little tough… More frustrating though is trying to draw!!! I don’t have Illustrator, but I was able to download an opensource version called Inkscape. I can see that it’s going to take me a while to learn how to manipulate the various tools, but I was able to do a slightly better job creating images in Inkscape than in Flash…. I need to spend more time creating my ‘acid’ movie, but I guess I have a pretty good start. Take a look:

I obviously have a lot more work to do, hopefully I’ll have more time this week to play around with it…..

chute