Programming is often viewed as an arcane art, an esoteric skill that is far removed from design and user experience. With the advent and evolution of higher-level programming languages, however, the power of coding is becoming accesible to an increasingly broad audience of designers, artists, and enthusiasts.

This course explores the use of programming as a tool to sculpt interactive experiences, in the context of Macromedia Flash's Actionscript programming language. Students will focus on core programming concepts, and will use these basic concepts to prototype personal projects. While the focus of the course is on developing with Actionscript, the concepts learned are common to all programming languages.

Contact
Eric Socolofsky
email: eric at transmote dot com
url: http://transmote.com/classes/pratt/ccdm-as/
office hours: 1 hour after class, by email, or by appointment

Students

Melissa Apanel	Teh-Kai (Kai) Hong	Kenneth Liu	Vida Alapour
Bronwen Sommer	Richard Blakeley	Mildred Figueroa	Chih-Hua Yeh
Jonathan Gibson

Assignments
There is generally one development assignment and a reading assignment for every class. Out-of-class assignments will initially be open-ended extensions of in-class examples, but will become increasingly project-based and longer-term as the course proceeds. Completed assignments will be dissected and analyzed in class. For all development assignments, please post your assignments by 6pm Wednesday every week. This will give me enough time to look over your work and address your issues and difficulties in class on Thursday.

The first half of the course will focus on basic programming concepts. After a brief introduction to the Flash authoring environment, topics will be language-agnostic and applicable to most programming languages. A midterm assignment will encapsulate the concepts introduced in the first half of the course.

The second half of the course will begin with intermediate topics, and will progress through more advanced concepts as students begin work on their final projects. Many of these topics will leverage capabilities unique to Flash, and will be relevant to students' project development. With a shift into production, reading assignments will be more focused, and less frequent.

Course Grading

Assignments (must be posted online)	25%
Class participation	15%
Midterm project	20%
Final project	40%

Links
There are far too many sites and projects that use Flash to list. Below is a sampling of some you may find useful, interesting, inspirational, or all three.

Resources
- Actionscript For Flash MX2004: The Definitive Guide, on O'Reilly Safari
This is the class text, and is an invaluable Actionscript reference. It is available in paperback, but can also be read online via O'Reilly Safari.

- Foundation Flash 8, by Friends of ED
This is the auxiliary class text. This book is optional to this class; it covers the Flash environment (IDE) with detailed tutorials.

- ultrashock.com is an all-around Flash community, with forums, tutorials, news, job listings, and more.
- Macromedia's DevNet has up-to-date news on Flash, including LiveDocs, a continually-updated reference to Flash and Actionscript.
- actionscript.org is another good Flash community site, with a deep repository of tutorials.
- flashkit.com has a very broad repository of cut-n-paste code. not good for learning, but great for cheating.

Navigation
- Intentionallies is a Japanese architecture firm whose site was designed by Flash superstar Yugo Nakamura (see 'Experimental Sites' below).
- Grant Skinner is a Flash developer who has an interesting and simple navigation scheme.
- global-action.org is an NYC media education non-profit, whose site is driven by a ColdFusion back-end that allows fully-updatable content.
- transmote.com. because sometimes you can't resist the urge to plug your own work...

Games
- orisinal.com is a collection of simple, beautifully-rendered games.
- shockwave.com and playfirst.com are commercial game sites, with a ton of flash content.

Experimental Sites
- yugop.com is Yugo Nakamura's showcase of his personal and for-profit works. Great experiments in interactivity.
- levitated.net is Jared Tarbell's playground of generative flash experiments. Some beautiful generative art.
- uncontrol.com is Manny Tan's collection of flash (and processing) experiments. Very lifelike animation.
- Amit Pitaru and James Patterson are two artists who often blend their programming, music, and illustration skills on their collaborative site insertsilence.com.
- vectorpark.com houses a series of creative animations, some interactive, some not, made by Patrick Smith.
- hoogerbrugge.com is a collection of, well, weird sh*t. interactivity ranging from subtle to mild. from the twisted mind of Han Hoogerbrugge.