The most difficult thing I will have to teach myself is probably going to be the moving of the waves on the beach and the thunderstorms and lighting. Honestly though, it's not going to be that hard. I've found my sources by googling 'CS5 Flash Tutorials'. Easy as pie. I'm pretty excited to start working on this part of the class. I have listed my links to the three tutorials that I have found on the right, and also on my wiki page.

Demoooo

I was pretty nervous before I actually presented my demo, but after I got going it wasn't that bad. I think that my demo want prety smoothly, and the experts didn't have much constructive criticism for me. I don't believe that they fully understood Duane's pop-up concept or his question idea for his game and I don't think they should have given him such a hard ime about it. Answering the questions for my game was pretty easy because I have already thought of how my game is going to play out and what kind of gameplay will be involved. I do not plan to make any changes to my game. The one idea suggested to me was to make the game more interactive. Example: The player would need to figure out what kind of medical needs the character needed. I don't like the idea, it's not what I had planned out from the beggining. Plus, it is too much like Virtual Villagers. This experience has made me realize that no matter what the experts say, it is still my game in the end. So I still choose what happens and how I make it work. I hope the others realize this too, because honestly some of the suggestions made to my classmates took away from their game. Other than that the whole thing went pretty well. It was really nice to finally meet Larry T! :D And thank you for the calendar, it's really nice.

Putting pieces together

I have not learned anything from about my topic from making  the game demo. Everything I needed to learn about my topic I learn while doing the research on my topic. I did, however, learn about how I am going to put my game together. If I could suggest changes for the curriculum, I would recommend making the blogs and questions less repetitive. For example, they ask us the EXACT same thing in every blog. "What have you learned about your topic?". Nothing, I have learned absolutely nothing new about my game topic since LAST time you asked us that. We were supposed to do research on our game topic at the begginging of the class. That's when I did mine, and I added it to the blogroll like we were supposed to. It just feels like we are doing the same thing over and over again, and it honestly makes the class boring. I also do not understand why we need to comment on other students in the knowledge community. Because hardly anyone is caught up with us, and many have blank pages. I feel like we are wasting our valuable class time searching through blank pages and endless links in hope that one person has a blog done. Ridiculous. All this blogging is also taking away from the real meaning of this class: game design. I signed up for this class with the impression that we would be learning scripting and coding of Flash games. We are thirteen weeks into this class and I have learned the most about blogging, not about game design. Mrs. Smith is an excellent teacher and she knows the program well, but she is not able to pass down all of her knowledge to us because we are too busy doing blogs that we have already done and updating our wiki pages. I understand that the wiki and blogs are put up to help us organize our thoughts on our games, but re-wording them and putting them back up forus to answer is not helping us learn Flash. It is just peeving us off and making us not want to continue taking this class. I would also make this class only available for high school students. When you asked us to edit our wiki pages, some of the middle school students had up their personal phone numbers and Myspace/Facebook URLs. They were up for several weeks. They are obviously not mature enough to handle being able to edit sources online. Especially when we were told not to add any personal information, not even our last names. Also, I feel as if we are answering our blogs fully and completely while other classes are talking about their dogs and what they did on the weekend. That has absolutely nothing to do with the class, nor does it answer any of the blog prompts given on the wiki. I have not taken learning into my own hands... Because I do not fully understand Flash yet. And guess what? Mrs. Smith can't teach it to us if we are busy wasting our times on blogs. I really hope that in my future I will be able to create an amazing game, and I thank Mrs. Smith for helping us.

I done learned this!

While researching my game topic, I learned the correct order you should look for things when you are stranded on a deserted island, or for that matter, in any survival situation. I've always thought that the first thing you should do is try to alert someone that you are stuck and need help. In reality, you need to find shelter then water, and then worry about alerting someone later on. Two of the sources listed on the sidebar state this inforamation. As for "gaining" understanding of the concept... It really isn't that hard to comprehand. Shelter then water. Simple, but it was an interesting piece of knowledge. I trust these sources because they both say the same thing. Had they both said different things I would have looked it up and done some more research.

Have I said this before?

I have searched through many of the other students profiles and blogs. I can honestly say that I have not found one with the same, or even similar, game idea to mine. Mainly because a lot of students are still doing the mini-games. So I'm not sure how to fully do this assignment being that our class is so far ahead and my idea is kind of... not normal. To touch on the blogrolling, I have many great links and ideas. So trying to slave through pages and pages of students, which are mainly blank, to find one single link seems a bit pointless to me. I have already done the research by myself and I think it is sufficient enough to get me through my game. I am honestly not trying to be rude or disobedient, but I have worked through two class periods to try and find someone else with an idea like mine and I have not come up with a single one.