I have been thinking about undertaking a project about the water-wise garden at the Bamboo Farm and Coastal Gardens in Savannah, Georgia. The problem with this is that the initial project request appears to be informational, not instructional.
After speaking further today with Gary Wade, Extension Horticulturist, he and I have talked about the idea of water-wise gardening, or Xeriscaping. We outlined an idea for an introductory xeriscaping module for adult learners. This may be promoted through and used by UGA Extension, the GA Urban Ag Center, and GA Water-Wise council.
Initially, we'll look at the 7 Steps of Xeriscaping and decide how large or fine the instruction will be. it seems that being able to convey all 7 steps would be more valuable to the learner instead of focusing on only a few steps.
Gary has provided content to me that he's helped to produce, as well as some supporting materials. I'll review these to get a better grasp on the potential scope of the project.
Since my client meeting last week, the scope for this project has been further refined. In order to complete an in-depth lesson on Xeriscaping this semester, I'll focus on designing and developing a module for just the first step: Planning and Design. This is probably the most detailed of the 7 steps, and should lead to some pretty interesting visuals and interactions with maps and garden designs. Ultimately, the learner should be able to take the knowledge gained and apply it their lives, designing their own Xeriscapes and appreciating water conservation in their homes and communities.
Documentation to come... first up, learning goals and objectives and target audience. I'll be delving deeper into this project to prepare for my Idea meeting this Thursday.
Also, must read the Alessi and Trollip chapters ASAP.
I met with Dr. Choi and Doug this week to talk about my project. They've both recommended that I approach this project as a simulation. This could be providing an empty yard that the user plants generic plants, determines water use-areas, and so on. The key to this is establishing what the user's end goal may be. I like the idea and think it's a good challenge that I'm fit for. However, I'm somewhat concerned with accurately defining natural events in a way that can be simulated. On one hand, I wonder about equations of natural laws (i.e. - the event of temperature heating the earth and in turn evaporating water stored in soil) vs. creating an arbitrary point system (like a role playing game).
I'm not sure where to start. I feel like I need to be reading books on game theory or logic, not necessarily Flash. The few Flash books I have come across don't quite match my thinking and I know I need to delve deeper. Books produced for pure game-world creation seem great on the outside, but they are usually for a specific language (not actionscript) and would be difficult to repurpose to another language -- or at least too time-consuming for this project.
My next steps include reading much more about simulations in Multimedia for Learning, collecting resources on game theory or simulation logic (if that exists?), and tile-based or isometric worlds. I think that the tile-based thing may pan out, but I'll have to read more about it.
Finally, I need to clarify my initial planning needs with my client.
I met with Gary (my client) again this past week. He's given me yet more content to pour over. It's good to have so many resources, but a little overwhelming in terms of focus! We talked about the goals, objectives and learner profiles. The average, target learner will be Georgia Master Gardeners. All that stuff is in my documentation section....
I'm understanding the simulation thing a bit more. With the goals in place, it's a bit easier to define what it is to be simulated. The ultimate test will be taking a sample yard and renovating it to have 60% low, 30% medium, and 10% high water use areas. There are basic principles that a gardener can keep in mind to reduce the high water-use areas in the landscape. Some of these principles cross into the other 6 steps of Xeriscaping, so it's a fine line I must tread to maintain my scope!
What I imagine right now would be an illustrated yard with designated high water-use zones. The learner can move items around and add to the environment. These items would have hidden water requirements based on the content. Then I can calculate area to determine the 60-30-10 rule. I'm not sure if this is the best way yet, but it's a reasonable approach.
This past week's class was very interesting, what with the guest speaker and two SIGs. I enjoyed hearing Dr. Palumbo speak -- his project management pointers really ring true in my professional life right now. I think it would be smart to take a few business classes while I'm in school too. Of course, I don't want to be one of those people who's a little good at a lot of things and not really good at anything....that's how I feel sometimes when I'm just spinning my wheels.
As to my project.. it's coming along alright I guess. I've worked on some prototypes for just the basic interface and simulation/map screen. There are definite elements that aren't there yet, but they'll come in time. I'm having a hard time envisioning the different screens. For now, I think that's it though. I have to just stare at things and mull them over for a while for it all to come together.
I'd rather be spending time solving problems in Flash right now. My general rule is to figure out the hardest thing first and work backwards. So, I guess I'm having some growing pains right now. I just hope I can pull of the simulation thing or else I'll be scrapping all these initial prototypes late in the class.
I've been catching up on my reading this past week and attempting to narrow my focus for this project. I've done further work on the prototype. After creating a little bit towards an interface in Photoshop, Illustrator and finally Flash, I've gotten my creative juices flowing and been able to work on the project flowchart. From here, I've been able to actually do more with prototyping and lay out a basic sequence of screens with expected contents and activities. This has been helpful since I can look at the whole scope of the project and determine what is actually possible to accomplish over the next 4-7 weeks and what items actually encourage learning and knowledge transfer vs. activities that have no inherent value. I can scrap those and really go for the focused material instead.
Overall, I'd say that my project is developing into a module with a mixed assortment of activities. I'm planning to create a physical simulation for the relationship between shade/light wet/dry time and plant growth. I'd also like more hands on activities where the learner manipulates a series of mapped landscapes for optimum conditions. Reading about Simulations in Alessi and Trollip has been helpful and inspiring for the approach to these activities.
I've also just recently acquired the new Adobe Creative Suite. Illustrator CS2 has a really awesome tracing tool that actually outputs Flash friendly vector graphics from originally raster based images. This is such a great feature that cuts hours and days off of my former methods of moving from paper illustrations to Flash. I'm definitely excited about using this tool and the quality of graphics that I might be able to easily add to my projects. Another next step will be deciding what kinds of illustrations I need to reproduce or illustrate myself.
I'll be meeting with Gary tomorrow morning. I hope that he's copasetic with my current direction. Otherwise, I may have unexpected adjustments before my next prototype meeting.
My meeting with Gary went well today. He's approved the goals for the course and pointed me to a few more resources to flesh out the learner profile.
I walked him through my flowchart and talked to him about various concepts I'm planning to present and create activities for. Basically, I'm off the mark on a few things, so it was VERY helpful to talk to him today and be able to adjust appropriately. He had some good ideas for activities as well, so we'll see how the flowchart and prototype may evolve from here.
What I need to do now:
I've tweaked my flowchart to be more in line with an interactive module. Essentially, I've planned for three main activities to practice concepts of garden design and planning and a terminal activity to combine all the covered material.
For the practice concepts, the same basic site map will be used. Based on the material presented, the user will be able to move items into the represented environment. For micro-climates and shade, this should be relatively easy since different kinds of plants respond to appropriate placement in the environment.
It will be difficult to provide an environment in which the user can assign regions for usage and watering. Some of these items may need to be preset.
A separate idea for dealing with this information would be to pose questions to the user about appropriate placement of plants in a given environment; based on their answers, the illustrated environment could change positively or negatively.
I attended Doug's CSS workshop this week. It was interesting to see how he sets up a page to use CSS. I'm still a firm advocate for using mixed methods -- especially using DreamWeaver as a management tool for large sites. It's good to know how to work outside a specific WSIWYG, but no harm in utilizing a tool to make the best better!
I've been looking at my prototypes, and I don't really like them. It's not the design in general, but it just doesn't seem to be there yet. I can't seem to get past this mental barrier, so I've been working on the guts of the problem instead. By that, I mean that I've been working on interactions and actionscripting instead of GUI design.
I've played around with fitting the most map into an 800x600 space. I've also been working on getting my map graphics from the original PDF to Flash. I usually use photoshop to erase any undesirable fills and then bring an EPS into Illustrator for tracing. Then Illustrator will export a swf for flash. While this sounds like a lot of steps -- it works well for me. I can't stand Fireworks for the little bit of time I've looked at it, and this method gets me where I need to be with the control I like to have. After all that, I do most of my design work direct in Flash. It's great for coloring, arranging, and just basic interface design.
This week was Bill Gray's Flash Gaming workshop. This was one of the more exciting workshops for me since I was able to talk to Bill and figure out what exactly I'm trying to do! (yes, I know that sounds vague). He went over a basic game that he'd designed and then visited with different students that had questions. It was good to see his AS, I understand some more AS elements I hadn't before.
We did talk about my idea to "color" in water-use zones for my final activity. I took a few example files from him and began combing the web for more information. I found this great tutorial on tile-based gaming at http://www.tonypa.pri.ee/tbw/. After reading this for awhile, I looked up tile-based gaming in Flash MX Game Design Demystified and used the script in that book to dynamically create a grid of tiles. Ultimately, I'm using the concept of tile-based worlds to populate an area that can be manipulated by the user. So, the user can pick a color to assign to any tiles that they roll their mouse over. In addition, I'm counting all the tiles of a certain color. It's still a bit off, since it doesn't reduce or adapt the count if you recolor an area. An no erasing yet either.... I feel like I'm on the right track with this. I'll have to play around a bit more to get the numbers to add up right, then I can start creating goals for correct ratios.
Bill has sent me a few example files of his own to examine too. I think these will help.
I'm also looking into adding some sort of tag to pop-up whenever a draggable item is chosen. I've found some good tutorials on hovering captions at: http://www.kirupa.com/developer/mx2004/hover_captions.htm
My project has come a long way in the past week. I've settled on a GUI design, put all of the content into the modules, and made place-holders for any missing images and interactions. While I don't like how some of the text reads, everything is going in a good direction and I can see what needs tweaking.
I've met with Gary; he's gone through the modules with me and given suggestions to improve the text. It's overwhelming at times because it seems like the things that take the most time are unimpressive while the things that are easiest get the most "wow-factor". I know I shouldn't be discouraged, since I am getting positive feedback and he likes it nonetheless. I think the miscommunication is really about what technology is employed -- like the hard stuff looks easy cause it would be phenomenally simple to create in PowerPoint and vice-versa (aside from the program being "smart" and calculating things on the back-end).
I also learned that I've been misusing the term "xeriscaping" all this time. I need to be sure that the final project says "Introduction to Xeriscape" and check out any places where I've used the term incorrectly.
Must keep plugging forward. Not too much longer to go before the final showcase.
Ohhhh. I did all this work last night and a little more this morning to prepare for my final meeting with Gary. At 9:55, when I was publishing my last version before my meeting, my computer froze! I shut everything down and thought I'd lost all the changes. This is after asking him to meet on Monday instead of Friday -- to buy more weekend time. I wasn't too freaked out since I still had the originals at home, but I couldn't retrieve them at work. So, first the projector doesn't work on Gary's computer, we come down to my office, and, THANK GOODNESS, the .swf file still had my most recent changes. I still lost all the work I did this morning, but it was only a few hours worth. At least I have a copy that I can refer to, to redo.
Gary was very pleased that the project has progressed so much over the past week. I added an intro screen, separated the two modules (overview and Step 1), and rearranged the text quite a bit. All of the interactions are in working order too. He actually said something today about how the drag-and-drop interactions work. I think he realized that it takes a bit more work to make those happen. That made me feel better. We also played with the watering-zone assignment at the end. He filled it out as he'd recommend, and got the right ratio -- that was also a good sign!
So, I've got a good amount of tweaking to do before the showcase. I feel pretty good about the project though and have sent out a few feelers for various evaluators (alpha/beta test participants).