Maze Intro

The Maze Project is a third in a series of projects made to give student’s an understanding of frame by frame animation along with basic programming skills. The first project was a simple ball animation which taught the students how to control a bouncing ball with a simple button.

The students were then given a project to learn how to detect collisions of two objects. This project was called the Spaceship Project. The Spaceship combined motion animations with hit detections and it also introduced scoring. An Example is shown below.

After these two projects, the stage was set for the maze. The students were given 10 websites to investigate the history of the world’s most ancient mazes and labrynths! Among those websites were some of the world’s current and modern mazes. You can visit these websites by going to the "helpful links" section of this page. After a thorough investigation, the building of the maze began. Each student started out with basic instructions on how to build the maze and the action script needed. After giving them ample time and script to make the basic maze work, the students were advised to alter the maze in order to make it their own!

Here you can really see which side of the computer user isle the student lands on. A maze with great graphics and animation means they excel in computer graphics and creativity. A maze with great functionality but with very little graphics means the student prefers the programming side of computer technology. Pay particular attention to the students that have both creative design and programming expertise! I feel that it is these students that possess true 21st Century skills....

Most mazes have multiple levels. A Rubric was created to encourage the students to make multiple levels, scoring, and incentives to have the user play again (make it challenging and fun!). Once complete, the students possess a valuable lesson in Flash animation, programming, and digital art. This can set the stage for possible interships programming the South Hills Website, or furthering their knowledge by taking advanced classes like Computer Programming (AP Computer Science)or Digital Art.