I was first introduced to Flash in the summer of 2004 by a friend who worked for a company called Knowledge Gain. He told me the company was looking for people to help create software for children with special learning needs. At the time I had been working at a technical call center for Brigham Young University. Working as a computer technician was a great experience, but I knew I didn't want to work in a call center forever. So, I downloaded the free 30-day trial of Flash MX 2004, checked out every book on Flash from the library, and started teaching myself the basics of Flash. One month later I started my first job as a Flash Designer at Knowledge Gain.
My first completed activity was "Penelope's Problem" a story about a pig who liked to dance.
For the next year I worked on well over twenty children's learning activities. During that time my primary responsibilities included:
- Converting lesson plans into audio scripts
- Editing audio files
- Generating original art
- Creating animations using Flash MX 2004
- Programming interactive activities using ActionScript 2.0
In addition to fulfilling these roles I worked on improving development processes. When I first arrived at Knowledge Gain there were standards set for how the activities should look, but no standardized way of developing according to these guidelines. After completing three or four activities I decided to gather some of the common functionality and artwork used by our team and created a template that helped significantly reduce production time.
During this time I also looked for ways of improving the Flash IDE by learning JSFL. Some of the scripts that I created can be found
here.
(Disclaimer: If you check them out, just keep in mind they were originally created for Flash MX 2004.) They are old and could probably use a good amount of cleaning up, but these scripts proved useful in performing tasks that were common for our development team.
