Which do i need, Flash or Shockwave?

[Quackers]

Now i have word searchs in the VLE, i want to be able to create basic drag and drop things. For example Science, match the symbol to the word, ie picture of a skull and crossbones to the word Toxic, Fire to Highly Flammable.

But which program do i need to create such things? and is it hard? i've never used Flash or Shockwave, and i would need a dummy tutorial.

[andy]

I would say Flash. Shockwave material is created in another Macromedia (Adobe?) package called Director, which in my day was used (amongst other things I'm sure) to author multimedia CDs. Flash is the popular one for online material (and all those damm games!) it produces (relatively) tiny files and even the player is microscopic.

As with most things its quite straightforward when you know how!! Flash is part of the Studio suite which is available on an Educationally priced site license available on ELCs which may be of interest particularly if you're going to do DiDa (we bought ours because we were, now we're not!) When I bought mine we got a subscription to the Macromedia University which has loads of getting started guides and tutorials etc. for all the packages.



Andy

[CyberNerd]

Flash - the shockwave player is a PITA for cross-platform
(Assuming you want kods access from home)

[sahmeepee]

As for "is it hard?" there's certainly a fairly steep learning curve when it comes to building complex interactivity into your animations. You should either set aside a good amount of time or look for examples of flash animations which are close to what you want. Unfortunately you can't edit a compiled flash file (a .swf) - you need the original authoring file (an .fla file) to do that.

The guy who makes those excellent wordsearches also releases the fla files for his resources for non-commercial use:

http://www.subtangent.com/flash/index.php

There's probably some good material in there to use as a starting point to give you a feel for the interaction/scripting side of Flash.