We’ve been showing the older children in Mr. Harrod’s room how to use Flash MX. Flash MX is a vector drawing and animation program. Previously, we instructed them in Hyperstudio – which was a joy to use as well as being more suitable for children - because it was designed for elementary age children – and we have children’s HS projects on our site. But development of HS just about came to standstill for a couple of years with the release of HS 4.0. HS 4.x has been extremely buggy so we have migrated to Flash MX.
For the children our purpose has been to show them how to use Flash’s simple drawing tools and how to move objects around the stage. Finally, we gave them a pre-built project from Lynda.com’s Hands On Training for Flash 5 – which gave them the drawing of a cat. We then showed them how to add the cat’s tongue on one frame, make a new keyframe while erasing the old tongue and drawing a new one. So each subsequent keyframe would have the cat’s tongue in a different place relative to its mouth. When the tongue finally made it to the other side of the cat’s mouth, we copied all the frames and turned them around 180° so that the cat’s tongue would then over time return to its original place.
All this takes place in less than a second – but allowed the children to make movement and then use that knowledge to make projects of their own.
