Paul’s Blog

About teaching Flash to beginners

August 21st, 2008

A major part of what I do is to teach people to run courses in creative applications and languages, including Flash. I’ve been teaching Flash since version 3.0, and in fact began using it when it was still FutureSplash… I still have a few of those early efforts on my hard drive ( I hate throwing things away), and some of them are still relevant - an animated clock, a ‘white lines’ animation that looks like you’re driving along a road, and a few early experiments with interactivity.

I taught Actionscript courses as well for a while, but now I tend to concentrate on the animation and multimedia side of the application. You know; the bits that don’t necessarily require coding to make them work, and I leave the scripting stuff to Richard Lord, who’s a proper programmer. I deliver the two day Introduction to Flash course that covers the stuff you need to know to make good looking animation, and we throw in bitmaps, sound, video and text into the pot, just to make sure that we’ve covered all the bases. The problem though, is what to do about Actionscript.

Is it acceptable on an introductory Flash course to completely ignore Actionscript? Personally, I don’t believe it is. Even the most visually-oriented graphic designer, with a phobia of all things code-related, will eventually want to make a button do something apart from change colour. Furthermore, the demographic of Flash users is changing, and moving heavily into online advertisers and marketeers, who will want to make their ads clickable at the very least.

So, I include a bit of scripting, mostly towards the tail end of the course, and I show people how to make a banner ad go to a URL, and how to make a simple navigational menu using ‘goTo’ commands. All pretty easy and straightforward, and if you use Script Assist mode, everybody is happy, and impressed that you don’t really need to program to make this kind of thing work. So, I probably spend around half an hour to 45 minutes at most on Actionsctript on an Introductory Flash course .

Enter Actionscript 3.0

Here’s the problem; as soon as you move over to AS3, things become much more difficult, in fact, we came to the conclusion that it would take around half a day just to show people how to do the above - namely, make a button go to a URL or go to another frame in the timeline.  Given that there are no Behaviours in AS3 movies, this essentially precludes doing any scripting at all, or sticking for now at least, to AS2 movies only, which is actually how I solve the problem.

Looking ahead

Obviously, this situation can’t continue, and I’ll have to move over to working with AS3 based movies at some point, because it will have become the de facto standard. In conclusion, I on’t want to drop scripting from my Intro courses, so I really hope Adobe decide to include behaviours in the next version. The general word is that having catered heavily to the coders in CS3, CS4 will include more designer-oriented features, so I’m optimistic.

Entry Filed under: Adobe, Flash