Introductory Lessons

You will be spending the first few weeks working on developing your programming skills.

There are three basic units of study.

The skill projects are designed to teach you basic programming and graphics concepts, and to familiarize you with how you can "instruct" the computer to "produce" what you tell it to by using specific computer "language."
The completion date for the introduction assignments will be Monday,
February 11, 2008.

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Introduction to Object Oriented Programming with "Alice"

You will use the program called "Alice" to build a three-dimensional world of your own devising and populate that world with several characters. Your characters will be animated and your world will have several "events" that are triggered by mouse clicks. This is a basic introduction to Object Oriented Programming. You will complete four tutorials and then build your own "world" using the skills you have developed.

Your finished "world" will be due on Monday, March 3.

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Once you have completed the skill units and the introduction to "Alice", you will return to Flash, where you will complete an additional set of drawing and animation tutorials and then design and create an animation consisting of a minimum of 30 frames and two separate scenes. The animation project will include original graphics and music.
You can see examples of the animation project here.

The animation project will be due on Tuesday, April 15, 2008.

click here to see examples of previous animations

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This next project is one that will require you to do some research into a topic of your choice. It is call the "Academic Resource Project" and will be worth 35% of your class grade. Make sure that you have checked with the teacher before you begin. You may use the library and/or Internet to do your research. Refer to the project requirements sheet for details, and refer to the Grading Rubric before you start. This project will be due on Friday, May 2, 2008.

click here for a full description of the project

click here for the grading rubric

click here for examples of previous projects

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FINAL PROJECT

You will start the final project activity on Monday, May 5, 2008. The project will be a solo or partner effort to design a programming project of your choice, based on the new skills and knowledge that you learned in the class. Some examples are an interactive computer game in Flash, a multi-level web page which uses Flash and/or Java programming, a complex 3D world using the tools you learned in "Alice," etc.
This project is due on Friday, June 6, 2008. This is a project that may require research. You may use the library and/or Internet to do your research. Refer to the project requirements sheet for details.
This project will be scheduled for public viewing during the week of Monday, June 9, 2008.

click here for examples of previous final projects

click here for Final Project Description and Checklist

click here for Final Project Grading Rubric