I was finally able to record a round of my SCOMaster game! Recap - It’s a multiplayer WiiFlash game designed to be played with teams in an instructor lead classroom setting. The object is to assemble a learning program structure the fastest - but watch out, because your opponent can take one of your SCOs and reuse them in their own program. Developed in Flash CS3 in about 150 hours.

Michael Gardner, will be showing this video during his presentation at DevLearn 08 at 1:30 on Wednesday 11/12 during his Practical Principles for Effective Learning Game Design (#206) session.

SCOMaster Gameplay

Casey’s gone back to school and things are settling down with the new baby, so I’m finding myself with a little free time again. When I posed the Creating a Flash WBT Framework post, I had planned to follow it up shortly with a few learning interactions, but I never found the time. Now I have some of that time. And being inspired by this conversation on the Pipweks board, I think that it’s something that would help out a lot of people.

I don’t plan to make them drop dead simple to use, like the old ones that were included with Flash, but I’d like to ask my (very few) readers: “What would you like me to do?” Are there interactions that you’d like to see?

I plan on making them class based, following the MVC pattern, with the data stored in an XML file. Should make it easy enough to modify, but the AS3 code would be intermediate level so it would require some effort there.

If I don’t receive any comments, I’ll just start wandering in a random direction and post what I come up with.

I don’t get to use Photoshop for illustrations very often anymore, so it’s fun when I do. I created this little thing to replace some uglier images on the same theme in a WBT we’re working on. Origional is here.

After a week and a half I finally finished my first real WiiFlash game - SCOMaster. It’s a competative, 2 player learning game designed to be played in a group setting. It illustrates the concepts of assembling a course in an LMS system. Bonus points are awarded for content reuse - they are SCOs after all! Unneeded objects and faulty objects can be sent back to the development team to be reworked - but at a cost.First one to build a completed activity tree wins.

Ben Hutchens, our graphic designer, created the art work for it. It took about 60 hours to program it using the WiiFlash classes that I had developed earlier in the year.

I’m presenting to the Bank’s Flash Community of Practice this Thursday on how to create a basic Flash WBT that includes SCORM  tracking. Below is the PPT deck that I’ll be using and below that is the sample file.

SCORM and Flash WBT Overview

This is an example file of a Flash WBT on the timeline, where my previous example was pure script. SCORM 1.2 compliant using my wrapper and Pipwerks SCORM API.

Timeline Based WBT Demo

I’m releasing the source code to the 2nd WBT framework that I created for Wachovia in mid-2004. Essentially, it works just like the example demo that I posed a few days ago: 1) an array of page IDs and 2) pages are movie clips in the library attached as the learner progressed though.

This version is pretty complicated, so it’ll be a challenge to figure out how it all works. But there is value in seeing the code for the individual page interactions. It’s not SCORM or AICC compliant - but it did track as a Docent Outliner module - those files aren’t included.

The framework file is the main file for a course. It loads an structure XML file (xml\framework.xml) that defines the list of modules for the course. The blank file what each lesson is built from. It contains all of the templates and is capable of running a course from an XML document.

These are Flash 7 FLAs. The code is Flash 6/MX level Actionscript. There aren’t really many comments in the code since I coded it for myself. But I did train a few coworkers how to use it. I haven’t worked in the code for over 3 years, so if you ask a question about it, I probably won’t remember what I did.

Here’s a preview of the interactions in the blank file:

http://www.nudoru.com/assets/portfolio/experimentalflash/ft2_samp.htm

Here’s the code:

Flash Template 2 Code

I put together part 1 of what I plan on being a multi-part series documeting the creation of a Flash WBT framework for creating SCORM compliant courses. This first once starts with an interface created in Flash CS3 and goes though the steps of adding the code to make it all work - and track on a SCORM 1.2 LMS. I’m using a custom wrapper class that I made for Pipwerks’ SCORM class. You need to know a bit about programming in Actionscript 3 - nothing advanced, but this isn’t in a tutoral format.

I’m hoping to fill a void with this - I know that there are a lot of people trying to develop WBTs in Flash and they have no idea where to start. I’ve been doing this for 4 years, and I know that I would have loved something like this when I started.

Example Documentation

Example Source Files

Please let me know if you find a bug, have a question, or have a comment or suggestion on what to cover next or how to make this better.

A few months ago, I made a comment about spinning off my ramen player for use at work and turning it into a player for learning content. Well, my first project with it is about to go live, so it’s worth another mention.

I’m calling this player “Scientia.”  I’ve added a lot of code for progress, tracking and completion. I’ve also integrated Pipwerks excellent SCORM wrapper into it.

The project is a system walk-though that’s presented to the learner with an avatar character. I’ve written up a short explanation of how the avatar SWF and audio player SWF work together. It’s pretty brief - post a comment if you want more information on it and I’ll see what more I can write.

Using XML events in a Flash player system

Also, I’m presenting at this month’s Bank of America Flash CoP meeting on Flash and SCORM communication. I’m going to create a very simple WBT/SCORM framework using Pipwerk’s wrapper. I’ll post the files and how-to when I get it written.

Off to the Ballantyne satellite offices to be locked in a room for 2 whole days of process mapping fun!

Crap. I hate it when that happens. BAC EL merged the instructional designers, developers and quality management into one design team. And we got 2 levels of new management.

I should be more upset about it. But after being outsourced once, this “chage wave” just doesn’t seem as big. Roll with it.

The BAC Wii project has come to an end for now - we delivered our final report yesterday. Hopefully word of what we’ve done will spread and we’ll be ask to share it with more groups. It was a really cool project to be on - the potential of the Wii and kinesthetic learning is an interesting area - and I don’t think that many people are doing much with it yet. Replacing the mouse with a Wii remote is a great way to increase engagement - I wonder if I could find a way to apply to compliance training? Would make for an interesting course assessment.

Anyway, I’m posting my outline of the Wii controller class that I spent all of January developing. It makes programming for WiiFlash super simple - just instantiate it and boom - Wii support in any Flash app. Works with all typical mouse events.

Wii Controller Engine

• Is an interface between Wii controllers (Remote and Nunchuk) WiiFlash and the application or game
• Enables quick ramp up for a developer without having to learn the intricacies of the Wii controllers or their data
  • Can add simple Wii controller to an app in as little as 3 lines of code
  • Contains about 1000 lines of code (not including virtual mouse or WiiFlash itself)
  • WiiFlash returns raw data – engine normalizes it up to make it useful for a developer
  • The Wii controllers return small, but long numbers – 0.000000007199879823173
  • “Smoothing” out the data – eliminates the hand jitter by throwing out small changes and/or averaging data over time
  • Accesses the cursor’s X and Y position – WiiFlash gives you the location of the IR points (prefers 2 of them) as the Remote sees them on a scale from 0-1 – not in relation to your screen area.  Engine handles switching from 2 IR points visible to 1 IR point and convert the data to exact X and Y coordinates of where you’re pointing
• Creates a secondary “virtual mouse” that allows the Wii mote to act as your normal mouse (separate from WiiFlash’s built-in “mouse control” mode) within the boundaries of your Flash movie
  • Uses Senocluar’s VirtualMouse class
  • A button is single click, B is double click
  • Makes it simple to add Wii capabilities to your app since it works with the mouse controls that you’re used to developing for
  • Allows for custom mouse cursors and the ability to switch between them with 1 line of code
  • Mouse cursors are contained in an external SWF
• Creates a standard way to getbutton press and release state information for the Remote and the Nunchuk.Provides “isDown” data for major buttons on the Remote and Nunchuk: A, B,C and Z
• Controls rumble – set the duration
• Provides Nunchuk data in the same way as the Remote: rotation, acceleration, etc.
• Nunchuk thumb stick – returns the position of the nub from -100 to +100
  • Also can use the 8 corners as buttons, names represent a compass: N, E, S and W
• Created (but not tested) with multiple Wii motes in mind – should easily scale to up to 4 Wii motes

WiiFlash 0.4 has been released today! New features include: 4 IR points on the sensor bar, tracking the size of the IR points (for determining depth), and battery information from the Wii remote.

Since Jason has been busy trying to get a good depth (z-axis) reading with the 0.3.2 release - this is very welcome news. I’d wondered how Nintendo managed to get this information and it never occured to me that the size of the IR point would be it - but it makes perfect sense.

Sadly our Wii research project ends tomorrow - we give our final presentation to the sponsors at 1pm. I hope that we get to keep the Wii motes and sensor bars - there are a few minigames that I’d like to make. It would be cool to make some WiiFlash games that Sophie could play.

This is a short presentation that I gave to the Bank’s Flash Platform Developer Community group 2 weeks about. Its about the event bubbling system in AS3 and includes an example of how I’m using it to trigger events in ramen Player. Also includes a screen shot of my current project at work - a demo for the new LMS system using an avatar character.

AS3 Event Bubbling Deck

The more I learn about events the better they get and more possibilities appear. I’ve added an audio player page object type that can control the avatar SWF by events. The whole thing is setup using XML - so it’s completely customizable.  You can do so much more than was ever possible in AS2 and with much less code. Probably doesn’t sound impressive, but they fact that they are all separate SWFs running though a player SWF with XML defined event data responding to custom events being passed from SWF to SWF, blah, blah, blah makes it sound more way more exciting.

Been busy at work lately! I’ve got a tight deadline on a big project that involves a system demo with an avatar character.

I’ve been working in XML and dynamic Flash for so long with my inFlite system (more info soon) that I have a hard time thinking in terms of time line based animation. So, I’ve forked RAMEN and am creating a version for work. I’m getting the opportunity to add a few cool features (which probably won’t mean anything since I haven’t shared much about RAMEN here): timer based animation triggers, image distortion, targeting MC’s inside of a loaded SWF, shape objects, eventmanger objects, blah blah blah.

The hardest thing with be to get it to talk to Lectora so that I can make a cohesive template.

Is it just me or is the NOAH Animated Avatar just creepy? Who would design anything and use an army of these little people to communicate about it to the users? You can control the size of them, but the detail that’s drawn into their outfits does not allow for them to be scaled too big.

Since I have a feeling of imminent doom at work, I need to get back into what happening in the online world again. So much has happened in the past 4 years that I just havn’t had the time to even explore: AJAX, Javascript becomming “DOM Scripting”, CSS2, Flex, Microformats, etc. I’ve bought a few Friends of Ed books on those topics and hope that I’ll find time to read them before the year is up.

Right now, I’ve settled on trying to learn Flex 2 and Actionscript 3. I bought Charles Brown’s book on Flex 2 and AS3, and plan on working through it over the next few weeks. I don’t think that I can come up with a “business use” for either of these, so it’ll probably be very slow going. If our client would upgrade to Flash player 9,they just now upgraded to 8, then the situation would be better - I feel like I’m really falling behind not learning AS3 right now. But if I can’t use it at work, I don’t have much free time at home to learn it.

I feel like I could pick up AJAX pretty easily, since I’ve got a lot of experience with JS and CSS in the past, I’ll try to pick that up in the fall.

I returned from vacation to find out that my work just announced a 5% staff reduction. We had a few people hit in my group. I don’t think that I’m in immediate danger, but I’ve taken the opportunity to update my resume and web site.

I havn’t had time to look at Actionscript 3 yet. I’m starting to feel left behind. Maybe I’ll get the chance when Wachovia rolls out the Flash 9 player, but that’s a year away.

Anyway, found a good tutorial on gotoAndLearn() forums on creating a basic AS3 driven site.