Here is my quiz, in its most primitive form:
Flash
html

There are three questions on the mental model my program teaches, three questions on color (the most complicated artistic element), two questions on texture, and two questions on shape. I tried to keep it as short as possible while still making the information it gathers meaningful, as I don't really think people at the Louvre would want to spend a lot of time taking a quiz at a computer-- most people are there for the art experience. This is the same reason I scrapped my game (besides taking the tutorial over 15 minutes). I think people would possibly complete 1 of the three sections, and then maybe take the quiz. But I don't think many would do the tutorial, play a game, and take a quiz when there are thousands of art objects to be seen.

In terms of revisions to this draft, I am thinking of resizing it and sacrificing the jpeg quality, but I have not decided yet if this is something I want to do. Especially considering that I would rather improve my tutorial, but if it is incompatible because of the size change, I might have to change it.

project update

First Draft Problems

In regards to my project, I have been working on the larger problems for the past few days. The problems I had were the following:

1. Misaligned text
2. Text buttons where the actual text was not clickable
3. Resizing the screen

Problems 1 and 2 were simple to fix once I determined the problem was Flash's default setting for text was dynamic, while most of my text is static (including the button text). This seems counter-intuitive to me, since it seems like most text tends to be static anyway, but maybe that is just my non-computer-savvyness speaking up.

The problems having text being "dynamic" when I actually wanted it to be "static' involved being unable to properly bold/italicize/resize different words within the same text block and being unable to turn the physical text into a button. So, after going through and relabeling all of my text as static, my buttons function properly, and my text is no longer misaligned.

Another problem that resulted from my non-savvyness was I assumed, that like a Word document, I could "select all" just resize my entire Flash document after I was finished creating it. This is not true. As a consequence, I have spent most of Thanksgiving Break resizing all of my buttons, images, etc individually. It's been super fun.

Now that I have finished this, I am starting to work on improving my animations. My largest criticism of Flash Professional 8 Revealed is each chapter is almost always completely separate from all other chapters. In effect, I have had some difficulty understanding how the different lessons I have learned can work together to create a coherent tutorial/website. What I would have preferred is to have built upon each chapter/the work done in each lesson so that at the end of the book I would have had a complete tutorial rather than a bunch of individual lessons that are not always easy to relate and apply to one another. But again, this complaint may just result from my general lack of experience in creating websites.

Very rough versions of my tutorial:

flash/swf version

html version

http://students.washington.edu/langner/explore_sculpture.swf
http://students.washington.edu/langner/explore_sculpture.html

Story Board Assignment

Project Update

I have started working on the storyboard for my project, which is somewhat daunting because of all of the details that go into the project at that point. Using my knowledge of Museum Education and The Essentials of Instructional Design as my crutch, I tried to create a reasonable layout in my flowchart that should bring the lessons of these two sources together into a useful program.

Responding to my audience as informal learners has been the most challenging part thus far. Although Flash initially seemed ripe with options for allowing the learners to make their own decisions, in actually designing the program it seems like the choices have become more limited than I was expecting. However, in this process I determined that my goal may simply be to make the audience feel as though they have a lot of choices and then secretly limit those choices enough that program users will actually learn something.

Just to provide a preview of my image-heavy program, here are a couple of the images I hope to morph using a combination of Flash and Photoshop:

Project Flowchart Assignment