MACROMEDIA FLASH™ FOR LECTURE PRESENTATIONS AND VIRTUAL LABS

Lecture presentations frequently incorporate rich graphics and multimedia content using presentation software such as Microsoft Powerpoint™ and Apple Quicktime™. As computer projection facilities become standard in the college classroom, professors are increasingly adding such content to undergraduate courses. Lab courses also often include computer simulations, usually compiled programs or Java applets. This talk will demonstrate a much more powerful approach using Macromedia Flash™. Flash has long been employed by web designers for creating pesky banner ads and simple cartoon-style web animations. Its potential as a lecture presentation and virtual lab development tool is largely untapped.

Despite friendly graphical editors for creating user-interface elements, languages such as C and Java require the programmer to do most of the work of generating custom graphics, which therefore tend to be rather primitive. Flash can be thought of as a sophisticated drawing/drafting program akin to Illustrator™ or Canvas™, that permits code fragments to be attached to graphic objects. Flash is truly cross-platform with no significant differences in performance on Win, Mac, or Unix systems. Flash applications can stand alone on the user's desktop or be served over the Web, and Flash can access data in HTML, XML, or plain TEXT documents. It's embedded programming language, Actionscript™, is arguably as powerful as a C compiler, yet non-programmers can generate quite useful basic animations.

A range of geoscience education applications will be presented.