1. Added Tutorials 1, 2, and Supplemental which are linked together as well as Generic Template 1 and Generic Template 2 which are not linked. They are all available as source files which you can download as a zip file here:
They are combined with the previously available files on integration and are all designed and made available for the specific purpose of promoting and encouraging mathematics in Flash animation on the World Wide Web. As usual no guarantees or warantees of any kind..
These are my first actual tutorials and I thought I would try something different by using Flash to create Flash Tutorials. A bit time consuming to do the drawing but once done, adaptable and a bit more user friendly to the visually motivated than the pseudocodiferous html tutorials favored by the programming populace. They might be improved and they not without faults of their own.
The current issue for me is the battery life on portable devices. There is general concern that Flash drains batteries and I do not have firsthand knowledge of the situation. All the mini-laptops I have tested these animations on have worked fine but all of them have been plugged in to a wall socket. I am not particularly concerned about commercial websites and social networking sites which have oversold advertising space to the tune of 20, 30 or more Flash banners per page all hopping about annoyingly, aimlessely and probably uselessly, each competing for its share of CPU time with a dozen or so feeds from here and there. They have given Flash a bad name but deservedly so along with the once prevelent endless "Introductions" and there are now a number of programs designed to stop such abuses, they may limit me somewhat but not significantly.
The specific issue is whether these Musemath type animations, generally only one or two at a time, with limited sequential animation are so battery intensive as to limit education time to the available wired electrical outlets which is extremly limited in some places and non-existent in others. I had been concerned with file size which I keep surprizingly small for very rapid transmission and download but it is now the concern that these small files requre too much cpu activity and consequent battery usage for the current trend away from desktop sized operating systems. If so, what can replace them?
Will Flash be available on the Mac Tablet? Few enough schoolkids will be able to afford that but it might give some indication towards the future. Silverlight is being touted, at least by Microsoft programmers but in any event from programmer to programmer and I am not in that conversation. HTML 5 is or soon will be relevant I understand, how, I am not sure. I believe I read Flash is becoming more available on smart phones (not just the Light version) which would indicate continued usefulness for wireless devices. Flash CS5 (Apri;l, May?) will enable non-flash programming apps for the ubiquitously popular I Phone but pda use in formal education is too advanced a topic for me (might kill the "I Cool", no?). Touchscreen is already an issue for me since these animations are pretty much created for mouse and touchpad. For all this I am googeling such words as ""CPU Cycles", "Flash Display List", and "HTML 5", "Apps".
In any event, Flash is available now, and will work across a wide range of media, better than has ever been possible to date and using these tutorials,you could put similar and better animations onto the Web in a very short time (say tonight), with minimal Flash knowledge. It will remain relevant for several years anyway. A trial version should allow practice, I believe a relatively inexpensive educational version would be legally required $3-500 US - check Adobe, be patient.
Once the information is online and transferred, it is available for all for as long as we all want to keep it - that is why I have thought it worthwhile to spend some time here. I know of no other way to promote anything like an equality of educational opportunity sufficient to justify putting the weapons back in their holsters. Realistically no one is checking them at the door, many of the people blowing things up these days seem to have a good education, perhaps it is not equality and fairness they want after all, only bigger explosions.
1. Added (and later modified) Design Ideas(renamed from 'Integration 1 Modification') which includes a few references to tutorials and animations currently of interest. (AS1&2, which are all I can work with at the moment) from two of the better collections of Flash animation, Senocular and Kirupa.
My general premise is that the creation of such animations is itself an effective learning method - and that both drawing and programming techniques should be used.
It is probably necessary to show the math used in order to establish the animation's validity as a model. Knowing how to program the math seems as important as the math itself. Much of the programming has rapidly gone beyond my ability to keep up. I took an AS3 course over the summer but apparently even the programmer teaching the course had been unable to move beyond AS2, I made little progress and expect this will have to pass to others.
Here is an external URL to some Flash tutorials with AS3. Take note that the new Adobe Creative Suite (CR4) is scheduled to be announced I believe next week, September 23, 2008. How long the older Flash animations will continue to work is not known
http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/3/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=1570
Actionscript 3 Tutorials
by Doug Ensley, Barbara KaskoszThe website evolved from our ongoing project sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Mathematical Association of America whose purpose is to empower educators in math and sciences to create web-based teaching materials using Adobe Flash.
Earlier Material of mine, possibly useful for drawing technique and some AS1 and AS2, mostly from others.
November 14, 2006
I had been experimenting with actionscripting a bit. These are all AS1 - there are no real step-by-step tutorials in my own work but the Source Files are included in the Download . They are commented and rather crudely coded, I have been much more interested in spontaneous drawing and getting a particular image and form of interactivity than in effective coding.
The following links will bring up the animations with "click to activate" in Explorer. None of the Animations in the Download have been updated for this so they should open in all versions of Flash from MX to current.
Coded Circular Functions
Coded Circular Functions 2
Coded Circular Functions 3
Coded Circular Functions 4
Coded Circular Functions 5
Coded Elastic String 1
More source files here and a new animation, (July 23, 2009 replaced by "Fourier 2".) which is as yet only in the planning stage. You can download the source file here
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Here, I am interested in the Musemath animations carrying with them the explanation of their creation. Their re - creation in the mind of the viewer would be the learning process. These are varying ideas for doing that.
My thinking here is twofold:
a. A programmer might put this all together in an hour whereas I might take a year or more and be hopelessly out of date.
b. Many drawing parts of the animations could be acomplished at a very young age on various inexpensive programs. The details and practicality of all this is beyond me but, if interested, this is how I did it.
I would consider Flash to have some advantage in presentation (if not overdone), and some disadvantage (built in) with regard to correct mathematical modeling. (Flash was originally a drawing program with perhaps certain shortcuts from the cartooning world - I understand the particular Bezier technique used will not draw a "mathematically perfect" circle but can render an apparent, largely indistinguishable likeness very quickly which is useful for quick motion animation on the web.)
In addition; More can be accomplished with a better knowledge of programming, physics and math than I have.
If interested, here are some other sources that may prove helpful. Previews, tutorials and downloadable FLA files are available from many. Not all of them were done with physics in mind but they contain interesting ideas. Many were created in older versions of Flash and may need some actionscript updating,
As always, there are no guarantees or warranties.
http://www.senocular.com/flash/source.php?id=0.114
Trigonometry Unit Circle
Senocular.com - great info, downlods and links.
Trevor
McCauley works for Adobe in San Francisco supporting Flash and Fireworks and
doing some Fireworks development on the side. In his free time, he develops
Flash and Fireworks content for senocular.com and moderates forums on popular
Flash-related sites such as Kirupa.com, ActionScript.org, and
UltraShock.com.
http://flash-creations.com/notes/asclass_math.php
sine_circle_zip - This downloadable file may be just what is needed for the Coded Circular Functions Animations.
About flash-creations.com
This site was designed by me, Helen
Triolo, to be used as an online accompaniment to DM2260: Flash Animation on the
Web and DM3260: Flash II: ActionScript, courses that I teach at the Corcoran
College of Art and Design in Washington DC
http://moock.org/asdg/codedepot/
Animations by Colin Moock from his book ActionScript for Flash MX: "Motion-circular_6" The code here may be getting a bit dated, there have been two updated versions of Flash since this book came out. My idea here is to add variable inputs to the "Circular Functions" animations such as "Coded Circular Functions 5". Nothing very much yet.
http://www.keveney.com/Engines.html
This is not a flash tutorial but the animations are fascinating. There is some detailed explanation of their creation much of which can be used to explain some the mathematics of motion - this is the way all the early Musemath animations were created. I found the site through
http://oscar.iitb.ac.in/oscarHome.do
Offline July 5, 2008
But I am having considerable
difficulty getting many of the Java Applets to work. - The main goal of Project
OSCAR (Open Source Courseware Animations Repository) is to create a repository
of web-based, interactive animations for teaching various concepts and
technologies.
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http://www.phong.com/tutorials/
These are some really good swf and fla files with wild
waves.
Created by Anson Vogt in: Flash 6/MX
The most relevant files to Musemath seem to be:
!random >
sine.swf
and
graph > 2 menu.swf
Some very interesting ideas for flash tutorials and some
particularly good wave animations - (may prove to be good for demonstrating the
physical string, the basil membrane and/or the changes in complex harmonic
waveforms that make up music - I'm speculating here).
http://home.phong.com/
http://www.phong.com/astro/c&s/index.php
http://www.phong.com/astro/source/
http://www.phong.com/astro/source/prowse.php?cmd=prowse&path=content%2Fgraph
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WARNING - The following has lots of rapidly
flashing lights and strobe effects for the first 5 or 10 seconds of the
introduction.
http://www.actionscript.cl/
lifaros_flashExperiments_box number 1 has a nice flash fourier analysis
animation
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3D Tutorial
http://imm.sheridanc.on.ca/imm2004/patniral/tutorial/tutorial01.php
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http://www.actionscripts.org/tutorials/intermediate/Flash_Physics_Study/index.shtml
Offline July 5, 2008 - This tutorial is about gravity, for me, its importance is
in its description of what should and should not be considered in a Flash
physics animation.
***
http://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/physics/
ALLEN Flash and Physics - Getting Physics Right
In this
tutorial, Dr Allen, a professor of mathematics discusses the do's and dont's,
the advantages and disadvantages of Flash animation for demonstrating physics.
Since I have already demonstrated a few of his don'ts, I consider this an
excellent starting place for improvement. Search his home page as well - he
sometimes puts other interesting things up.
Note: Some of the Musemath animations were created using a hybrid method where the math was done on paper and objects positioned accordingly, "easing" was applied as necessary. While the method of programming the math directly into actionscript is much preferred, there may be times when such hybrid technique should be kept in mind, such as: preliminary sketching, artistic design, practical simplification, , and possibly as a means of having the viewer duplicate the animation by doing the math and then positioning the objects on a virtual timeline and stage by "drag and drop". It is a possible "game like environment" for learning.
http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/Flash
All Flash - take a look at (among others): -Classical
Mechanics/Simple Harmonic Motion - Soundwaves/Pressure and Displacement Waves -.
Soundwaves/Temperament - Waves/Standing Waves With a Node at Both Ends Also,
http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca> Virtual Bookshelf >Classical >Standing
Waves
ProfessorHarrison is looking for people with the skills to improve his
animations and will provide his FLA files. ( April 2005) - He has recently put
up an interesting tutorial.
*****
http://www.tsof.edu.au/resources/animation/2d/Advanced/flash_physics/flash_physics.02.swfOffline July 5, 2008 - Another official education site with some ideas about Flash and physics
http://www.krazydad.com/bestiary/bestiary_springBuilder.html
http://krazydad.com/bestiary/askjim.html
>math and
physics tutorials
Jim Bumgardner. A programmer/hobbyist
with a passion for making cool graphics software, and software toys.
He is also a musician and has set some music to Flash animation that I find interesting: http://www.coverpop.com/whitney/
http://www.the-stickman.com/tutorials/miscellaneous.shtml
f5bendyline.swf
– 2kb
and
f5elasticballs.swf – 1 kb
If you click and drag directly on one of the beads you can see why I am appreciative of and interested in his work.He states it is not a correct physics representation, it certainly holds promise.
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/spring.htm
elastic.swf
– 1kb
http://bit-101.com/tutorials/elasticity.html
An actionscript tutorial on elascticity at an easy to read level.
There are several other tutorials on the site as well, Thanks to Keith
Peters.