by Bill Talsma, Designer/Flash Animator
25. June 2009 15:29
The evolution of Flash and Actionscript have completely changed the landscape for developing interactive training, whether the training is online or installed on a local machine.
Designers and developers now turn to Flash for a wide variety of uses–from animations, presentations, and banner ads to websites and games. Training is a natural addition to the list. Designers have embraced Flash because it enables them to make training much more visually appealing–the design possibilities are virtually limitless. Developers like the dynamic Flash/Actionscript duo for training applications because it enables them to program and unleash powerful, event-based, user-driven scenarios–something that originally required a medium-level programming language like C++.
All that users need to access the training product is the ubiquitous Flash Player. In mature markets like the United States, 99 percent of Internet-enabled computers have Flash Player installed. Flash Player has the advantage of being very ‘lightweight’–meaning that rich media content requires little effort from your pc to manage and display. Typical users no longer see their devices struggle to handle animations and video files–and based on their exposure to the Web and to interactive games, they are increasingly likely to expect these media types to be used for training.
Actionscript is the programming language for Flash. It is related to Javascript, which is commonly used by Web developers to program access to objects within other applications. Actionscript is object-oriented as well, which helps when you are developing a training curriculum that reuses common elements. By communicating through a middleman like XML or PHP, for example, Actionscript can converse with databases, applications, and other Flash files. As a result, it is now possible in Flash to track a trainee’s actions (i.e., their clickstream), trigger an event (e.g., pass data to a training database or display new graphics in response to trainee choices), or make calculations (e.g., assign a score to a trainee for a specific action).
That’s why Flash is now in wide use to create interactive, scenario-based training–because it combines visually rich animations and graphics with computations, transactions and the ability to generate reports.
Bill Talsma is a Designer and Flash Animator with Quicksilver Associates and was the lead Flash designer for RSC Equipment Rental's interactive training.
