Flash Brief Completion

The Flash Creative Brief has now been completed. I am pleased with the final outcome. I think that we achieved all that we set out to, and the client was very pleased with the final product. The main difficulty we had was they we were more developers than designers, so the design was according to our skillset and abilities. However, the client was happy with the layout, colour scheme and design.

Here is the final design of the menu:



Here is the design of the food exercise:



Here is the final outcome, delivered to the client:

My writing exercise:
http://www.d10dev-studio.com/ZoeBritnell/food/food.swf

Shamim's match them up exercise:
http://www.d10dev-studio.com/ZoeBritnell/shamim/flags2.swf

For the purposes of D10, and incorporating the 2 exercises under one menu, I created a menu to link them together. This was initially challenging, as the first menu, when you clicked and entered into one of the exercises, the buttons would not work as they were looking for the base level 0, which was now the menu movie.swf, not the French exercise movie swf file. To work around this, I used loadmovienum, so that when the exercise was loaded it was then the new level 0.

Here is the link to the menu and the exercises:
http://www.d10dev-studio.com/ZoeBritnell/menu/menu2.swf

Presentation to Client

We had our final meeting at Sequence a few days before the final deadline. This put pressure on us to make sure that we had the final product to present ahead of schedule, but we managed it. Phil and Steve were at the meeting again, as was the client, Cath Murphy. They were all very pleased with what we had achieved in the time frame. They were especially pleased that we had managed to tie the exercises in with the XML files. Phil stated that we had 'over delivered' in the sense that we had delivered over and above what they had expected.

As we had already uploaded our exercises, the client had some changes that she wanted us to do before the final deadline. This was a productive meeting to be able to have some valid experience of meeting a client, although in the 'real world' we would have met the client at the beginning of the project, not at the end. Never the less, the changes she requested were minor, and as follows:

*To make the instructions for the exercises as generic as possible for all writing and match them up French exercises, so they can be used in the future.

*To remove the exit button as it was not needed.

*To make sure that the exercises would be able to pull in the XML data on a loop basis, so that they would be capable of up to 10 possible answers per question.

*To remove the title on each exercise.

*To make it clear that the instructions are non-interactive and not part of the actual quiz.

*To create a page where the user can choose whether to read the instructions or go straight to the quiz.

We had already anticipated and planned to make some of these changes, and we set about implementing them in the final few days of the brief.

Overall the client was very happy and said that she like the design and layout of the quizzes and would be interested in working with myself and Shamim in the future.

Flash Build

Having ascertained the scope of the project and which direction to take we set about our respective tasks. Shamim had already begun to research the drag and drop technique, so he continued to develop a match the flags French exercise for Year 7. I decided to do a writing exercise for the same age group, so I took on the food French exercise.

We have already designed some initial mock ups of the exercises, and began to now build them in Flash. In building the writing exercise, I initially used arrays to pull in the picture content. Only after further training in XML was I able to finalise the exercise with adaptations to accomodate the XML.

We carried out some testing with other people and other versions of Flash. Here were the findings, which we implemented:

On the writing exercise -
*When you click on the check button and have got the answer right, the next arrow should flash, to encourage the user to go onto the next question.
*There should be a results page at the end with all the possible correct answers.
*A moving cursor and a border around the instructions, so it doesn't look interactive.

Match them up exercise -
*To make the text and flags larger.
*To adjust the actionscript so that it is not possible to drop 2 flags on top of eachother.
*To have some feedback on how well they are doing.

Base Camp

Back at base camp we drew up a Gantt chart, to monitor how the project is going, and to set key milestones. We also carried out some research on offline and online language exercises, to broaden our ideas on what to do. We looked at the following sites, at it stated on the brief that the client is looking for something like this -
www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/quiz/mquiz.asp?filename=salut
www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/match/dragflip.asp?filename=hobbies

We liked the simple style of these exercises, which suits the age range that we are aiming at - 11 year olds. These exercises had large buttons and text. It was obvious what to do, and there was good use of pictures and feedback where needed.

We also looked at www.vocabulary.co.il/ , which had an example of a hangman game exercise, and a multiple choice quiz.

www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primary/french had a good menu to follow.

http://funschool.kaboose.com/arcade/language/index.html has number language games.

We also looked at the Eurotalk Interactive Learn Italian cd roms for children. This was good to see how they, for instance, do 'match them up' exercises. However, the design was not that great and the naviagtion not very simple.

Sequence Meeting

Our first meeting at Sequence was with myself, Shamim, Phil Murphy, and Steve Brewer - a web developer. This was a very productive meeting as we established what they were expecting of us. They did not was a CMS system, Sequence have one set up for this website. They just wanted us to create the exercises to feed into the XML files. Also, we checked with Phil that it was ok to go ahead and create 2 French exercises for Year 7. They were pleased, as these exercises are aimed at the younger end of the age range, which is well suited to Flash exercises as it makes them more visually appealing.

We also established that they wanted us to use the existing pictures on the website. This was good news, as both Shamim and myself are more developers than designers, so it meant that we could concentrate on the technical side.

I knew after this meeting that it was vital that we created the exercises so that they worked with the existing XML files, as this is what the client was after.

Flash Creative Brief

Towards the end of the Christmas term we were given our Flash briefs. I am in a team with Shamim and we have been given a brief from Sequence. This is quite a challenging brief as it requires us to adapt some exercises from DHTML into Flash, drawing the content from XML files. As both Shamim and I have limited previous experience in Flash, and XML is completely new to us, this was going to be a fast learning curve. We have been asked to adapt some exercises from the website: www.languageskills.co.uk . By creating some of these exercises in Flash 8, and using the XML files, it is hoped that we would develop an authoring template, whereby future adapations of existing exercises into Flash would be build using this template.

One of our first questions to Phil Murphy at Sequence would be are they also asking for a CMS, as mentioned on the brief. Also, the scope of the project is needed to be narrowed down as there are hundreds of language exercises on the website, and we need to check which ones they would like us to build.