Tutorials - Animation Technique

July 2, 2011

1. The Ipad and Flash for Mobile are now both out and in use and the Musemath animations have been largely rewritten to take this into account. More work is expected but no further tutorials, this seems the province of programmers.

From a short experience on the Droid 2, they appear to work fine though they are optimized for tablet sized screens.

2. The animations are not and possibly never will be "Mobile Apps" but they seem better suited to the kind of imagery I have seen on those devices so far. They include some better understanding of the music and math subjects as would be expected and will continue to function well on desktops, laptops, netbooks, android tablets etc. and I will try to develop some better "Alternate Content" for the non-Flash devices.

3. Some of the older material which seemed less suitable to the new "mobile environment" has been removed.

January 1, 2010

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:

tutorials_january_1_2010.zip

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 - they might be improved and are 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.

September 18, 2008

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

http://www.flashandmath.com/

Actionscript 3 Tutorials
by Doug Ensley, Barbara Kaskosz

The 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
(modified Sept 12, 2010)

I had been experimenting with actionscripting, most are now abandoned and the field left to the professionals to foster better mobile programming, Though poorly coded, I would like to leave the following in place for a while: Coded Elastic String 1

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://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://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.

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.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.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/spring.htm

elastic.swf – 1kb

http://bit-101.com/tutorials/elasticity.html

An actionscript tutorial on elasticity at an easy to read level. There are several other tutorials on the site as well, Thanks to Keith Peters.

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