Reflection - The Production of the Prototype

After we have made the storyboard, I need to learn necessary techniques to make the storyboard become a real thing, the Flash learning object. I first identified the techniques involved in the Map exercise and the Bouncing Ball exercise would be what I need to master for the prototype production.

There are basic Flash skills embedded in the production of interactive presentation from those Flash tutorials. Both the movie type and printed type of tutorials are good for the self-study purpose. I started with the movie ones because they looked like easy to learn. Later, when I got more familiar with such teaching aids, I felt confident to learn more techniques from reading tutorial books. The more complicated Flash samples can be better explained from the print format. Unlike the movie tutorial, the print format one allows me to revisit each part of a tutorial sample right away.

I enjoy working together with my partner, Qingchun. She knows very well about computer. I prepared myself by viewing the movie tutorials and practicing the exercises before we worked on our project together. It is good to have one person (Qingchun) concentrating on the operation and the other (myself) on checking operation errors.

Qingchun was well prepared for the discussion meeting with a tutorial book as our teacher. She showed her proficiency in computer skills. I learnt by observing how she operated the keys of the computer keyboard. It was a good learning lesson. I have learnt those details that both the movie and print tutorials are unable to show.

I reread those comments given by classmates for our prototype and I understand more about it from the audience’s perspective. For example, it is better to show the sequence of those sentences. Even though that is an obvious component of the learning content, I am not conscious about that. Also, some other areas for improvement such as from where to begin the saying of the rhyme, too many hot spot buttons and the fading words should be taken into consideration.

However, we have a brand new version of the learning material. What we are going to do with these two versions is another concern. Should we discard one? Or, combine them together into a more complicated version? Do we have time and skills to handle that? Let’s gather some ideas and then decide what to do next.