Bluejake

As soon as I heard about Flash Math Creativity, the new book put out by Friends of Ed, I knew that I was going to buy it. Back when I first started at Oven, I played around with Flash Math movies- mostly to teach myself Action Script. Most of my results were pretty weak- but I enjoyed exploring the effects. Most Flash Math movies are built around simple cyclic functions like Sine and Cosine. Throw in a random number generator and you have the basics needed to produce a great variety of patterns and shapes. The Action Script in these movies is pretty straight forward: a simple movie clip is created and then duplicated hundreds or thousands of times to create the desired effect. In Jamie Macdonald's SinGrid, shown to the left, the script consists of a controller function responsible for the clip duplication and a math function responsible for undulating pattern. Some of the more advanced examples in the book are based on fractal math- great for producing organic shapes like flowers and sea shells.

I'm going to include two or three Flash Math lessons in my Advanced Multimedia class this Fall at the New School. I think these projects are great for reviewing the basics of Action Script, as well as for creating cool interstitial graphics.

Ideas