Categories
Teaching

Breaking a Task into Small Steps

Creating steps for a project is a way of making it manageable from the beginning, so that you can look at small parts without worrying and being overwhelmed by the whole. so often schools and bosses just hand you a jo, big massive and overwhelming.
In my Flash class the students can treat the story project in small little pieces, so they can succed at it. When I first gave the assignment in the main class they always floundered as it left them with lot’s of jumps and huge steps obvious to me as a old fart, but not to them.

Creating a visual display of the Flash structure that they can handle andmake real for themselves is an effective learning tool asĀ  they can see the code on the index cards, then see it work on the timeline. I need more stuff like that!

The challenge for me is to use those steps in my daily work. What the steps do is allow me to break work into fifteen minute chunks since so often I onlyhave fifteen here and there and if I know what the fifteen minute chunk is I can do any project I want.

ActionScript steps that I am working on.

  1. The Creative Brief
  2. A Content list
  3. Project Requirements
  4. Use Case Visualization, Storyboards meets Use case, by aligning the storyboard with a textual description of what the system and the user is doing it allows complexity in the design to be revealed
  5. Psuedo UML , essentially flow charts combined with diagrams of the actions their program will have to take.
  6. Psuedo-Code, English language descriptions of what their code is going to do.

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