Teaching Flash to kids - any good software

[scgf]

One of our staff wants to teach some flash animation to pupils. Does anyone know of any good (preferably cheap!) software for this?

Many thanks.

[deanc]

depending on the age range of the kids, afaik the only software to build flash is adobe. there are a load of tutorials on www.teach-ict.com but just about all ict teachers should know that anyway

[CyberNerd]

Scratch doesn't do flash but it does teach the fundamentals of programming and it's designed for kids..
http://scratch.mit.edu/

OpenLaszlo may also fit the bill
http://www.openlaszlo.org/

otherwise adobe flash, but its not cheap.

[SimpleSi]

I think Adobe do educational prices for Flash but maybe that was just a fib from an ICT CO-ordinator when I asked how they could afford it

regards

Simon

[TechSupp]

If its just so they can create flash files but without the scripting knowledge try and find a download of Power Bullet Presenter, great little tool to create talking flash books, simple animated presentations etc

ps its free!!!

[dhicks]

One of our staff wants to teach some flash animation to pupils. Does anyone know of any good (preferably cheap!) software for this?

Like a cut-down Flash Lite kind of thing? It depends on your exact needs. I know I looked a few years ago and couldn't find anything suitible.

There are a number of applications that output stuff in Flash format - Swish and KoolMoves, for instance. Wikipedia has a section on animation software (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...ation_software) that links to both those tools and a bunch of others.

You could do animation with OpenOffice Presenter (which outputs straight to .swf format if you tell it to) or Microsoft Powerpoint (for which there are a number of plugins available that will convert to SWF). Either option might not produce perfectly matched results between the original animation and the animation you see as an SWF file. I'd say give OpenOffice a go, it is free after all!

Adobe have an educational pricing programme. The edition of Adobe Creative Suite 3 that includes Flash is around £3000 - £5000 per school, depending on size. This is actually a pretty good deal as it covers the whole school and (I seem to remember) home use for 50 staff too.

Awkwardly, the version of CS3 that includes Flash doesn't also include Photoshop - you either have to buy a different edition of CS3 or get the "ultimate" version with everything in (around £7000 for a school, I think, and that includes Premier for video editing, Acrobat, etc, etc).

I've found that Flash is horrible to teach to children as a general-purpose animation tool. It's really a full-blown development environment. It's more suitible to be taught to older pupils on some kind of vocational programme. I still use Flash MX 2004, though, so the user interface might have improved (i.e. become more standard / consistent / less buggy) by now.

--
David Hicks

[scgf]

Cheers guys.

We already use OpenOffice so I will give Impress -> Flash a go. I have also downloaded Power Bullet Presenter to try out.

What an excellent forum