My individual project going to be a forum for VIS students to discuss current events, schoolwork, and life. Of course, it won't be too detailed (that would require a lot more time than I have) but it'll have the basic features that a forum-based website needs - accounts, forums and a home page.
People in our school tend to not listen in class or simply not understand what's going on. This hinders their studying and efforts at homework and means they perform poorly and class. A solution to this would be to have a forum which allows students to discuss what's going on in class and ask for help on homework. This forum would allow teachers and students to collaborate and learn, thus increasing productivity both in- and outside class, as well as students' understanding.
This, made with Flash Catalyst, is a homework 'organizer' which shows you what homework is assigned in different classes.
This is a video using the wallwalk effect.
This is the forum that I made.
I am pretty happy with the final result of my project. While I feel that if it was to be implemented in a real-world situation it would need a variety of changes, mostly for security, customizability, and professionalism, I think that for an ICT project to show my abilities it is an accurate indicator.
The nice thing about this project was that it let me use skills that I had gained over the course of the year. This meant that, apart from the Final Cut Express film, I did not learn much new stuff - instead, I refined my skills in Flash Catalyst, Dreamweaver, and programming. I did, however, learn a bit about Final Cut Express, which extended on what I had learned in Film. I learned how to do the wall-walk effect (which I had previously not heard of) and use the different features that Final Cut offers.
During my creation stage I used a variety of hardware and software. I used both Mac and PC computers, because I worked at school and at home. Not only did I use monitors and keyboards and mice, which are sort of mandatory, but I also used a video camera to film my video. Mostly I worked with the more costly programs - Dreamweaver, Final Cut, and Flash Catalyst - while at school, and with the less-costly programs and a XAMPP server at home. While I certainly would have liked to work on my forum more at school, I could not see a safe and simple way to install a localhost server on the school computers without getting in trouble, and working from my website's server was too complicated.
There are four main parts to my project: the website which you are looking at (created in Dreamweaver); the forum (coded in PHP, generally through the Windows text editor Notepad++); the video, intended as an advertisement for the aforementioned forums (filmed with a tape-equipped video camera and edited with Final Cut Express); and the homework organizer (created solely in Flash Catalyst).
Creating this website was simple; all it required was my HTML and CSS knowledge. All work is my own, except for the color scheme, which I found online. As you can see, it is hosted on my website, PixelPuppy, because the forum component requires PHP, which is not available on most computers and therefore would not be accessible otherwise. I like the lack of clutter in the theme, but one thing I am not happy with is the lack of centering of the navigation links at the top of the page. I also think that the layout might be a bit too dull; a logo or even just a bit of descriptive text near the top of the page might have been nice.
The forum was much more complicated to create. The good thing is that I had already created a basic forum, tentatively dubbed 'UserSystem' at the time, which I was able to integrate with the website here. Apart from a few functions, mostly safety functions, which I took (with permission) from the internet and modified, the work was all my own. Despite the fact that I did not create the forum script with the intent of using it in this project, it took a long time to create. (As always with programming, it was mostly solving glitches, but still.) I originally had intended to code the forum from scratch again, but I realized that this was not a good idea, especially since my previous script was perfectly adequate. I think that it is likely that there are still glitches on the moderation side of the script. (This is because things such as removing posts from threads present a variety of changes to the database: the amount of posts on a thread, the last post/poster/post date, the latest thread in a forum, the amount of threads/posts in the database... These are very hard to accurately tally up without using an excess of queries, and therefore moderation functions such as this one are likely flawed.)
The video took around a week-and-a-half of lessons. First I had to film the material I wanted, and then I had to edit it. I filmed it and almost lost my footage when my original computer crashed, but then was able to access it again. Because I had not been able to access the guide to making a wall-walk movie in Final Cut Express, I used a variety of effects instead. I also added in text at the end. One problem that I had with my video was that while filming it, the tripod was not at its most reliable. This meant that it did just what it was not supposed to do: it moved. It's very important for the wall-walk effect that the frame stays still; faced with this error, I resorted to an earthquake-like effect to hide the problem. Fatin said, "It was great. Before this, you said that you wanted to make it as if the people went into the computer, but instead they just disappeared." The deviation from my plan was necessary because it would have been rather difficult, not to mention dangerous, to have people literally acting as if they were climbing into computers.
The homework organizer is probably the least complicated of all things, since it just utilized my Flash Catalyst skills. The organizer includes multiple pages, with links, and data lists with scrollbars. I am proud of it because I made it completely using the tools supplied to me in Flash Catalyst, rather than beginning in Adobe Illustrator. While I suppose that for some things it's convenient to have everything planned out in Illustrator first, I thought that having everything in Catalyst gave me more flexibility to change things as the project evolved. I used a lot of images from the internet, such as book covers and graphs of functions; however, as far as I know, all of them are free-to-use. One flaw that I realize is that the project is a bit sparse, and I think that if I had had more time I would have attempted to build dynamic data into the project. I obtained external feedback from Dinushi. She said: "I think that the organizer is very informative, but the graphics could be a bit more eye-catching."
Overall, I think that my project was of a high standard. I think that if the goal had been more structured, I might have been able to achieve more; this is not because I didn't do much with my project as is, but because the lack of a formal goal let me explore more options in the programs and make my project more unique.