About the Flash and Math Website
Welcome to the Flash and Math website! This website was founded by Barbara Kaskosz and Doug Ensley in July 2007. The website evolved from our 2006 - 2008 project sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Mathematical Association of America whose purpose was to empower educators in math and sciences to create web-based teaching materials using Adobe Flash. During this project, we developed a collection of ActionScript 3 tutorials and Flash applets for mathematics. In the process, we discovered that our AS3 tutorials were of interest to the general Flash developers' community. After the project ended, we became completely hooked on Flash, and we continue writing AS3 tutorials and creating AS3 effects.
In July 2009 Dan Gries joined the Flash and Math team. Dan is a mathematician but also a talented
designer and programmer. His ActionScript 3 effects are widely popular in the Flash developer's
community. The AS3 effects that he prepared for Flash and Math before joining our team,
are among our most popular entries, among them:
A Bitmap Rotating in 3D Explodes into Particles.
Since we established this website our traffic has been growing fast. Lately we are exceeding 670,000 page views a month and over 240,000 visitors monthly. Our growing stats make us happy and we are glad to be contributing to mathematics education and to the Flash community.
The Flash and Math Team
 Barbara Kaskosz, Ph.D. Professor of Mathematics Department of Mathematics University of Rhode Island. |
 Doug Ensley, Ph.D. Professor of Mathematics Department of Mathematics Shippensburg University. |
 Dan Gries, Ph.D. Mathematics Faculty Hopkins School New Haven, Connecticut |
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Flash and Math receives the 2009 ICTCM Award - March 2009
The Flash and Math project that includes the flashandmath.com website and our book featured below has just been honored by the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics (ICTCM) with the 2009 ICTCM Award for Excellence and Innovation with the Use of Technology in Collegiate Mathematics!.
About our NSF - MAA Project
Our project is sponsored by the NSF grant DUE-0535327, "Tools and Training for Developers of Mathematics and Science Teaching Materials in Flash". Since the project began, we have conducted a series of Flash workshops and presentations at annual conferences. In particular, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) in 2006, 2007, 2008, and at the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics (ICTCM) in 2006, 2007 and 2008.
In June 2007, we conducted a very successful, week-long workshop Flash at the Beach: Creating Mathlets with Adobe Flash at the University of Rhode Island. The workshop was sponsored by the Professional Enhancements Programs (PREP) of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). Some of the tutorials on this site were prepared for that workshop. We conducted another PREP workshop on Flash in June 2008: Flash in the Valley: Creating Mathlets with Adobe Flash.
We also established MathDL Flash Forum at the Mathematical Sciences Digital Library (MathDL). MathDL is sponsored by the NSF and the MAA. At the MathDL Flash Forum we publish atricles related to Flash and math education that provide complete ActionScript code. ActionScript 3 articles, all of which contain custom AS3 classes, are linked at the Development Articles and Custom Classes section of this site.
About Our Book
Our workshops and our project gave rise to a book Flash and Math Applets: Learn by Example which is available at amazon.com.
This book is designed for beginners to ActionScript 3 (AS3) programming in the Flash CS3 and Flash CS4 environments. Users of either program will find the AS3 examples to be useful and informative, and there is one chapter devoted exclusively to the new 3D methods available in Flash CS4 for Flash Player 10.
The book is unique in its approach of emphasizing the “timeline programming techniques” that have made Flash development accessible over the years. Our tiered learning approach starts from scratch and builds each example upon what has come before. In our conference workshops and one-week courses, we have met many people with a lot of great ideas for applications they would like to build for teaching and learning. The examples in this book have been chosen to reflect the needs and interests of those participants.
While this book contains a wealth of examples of interest to educators, we also have had a great response from general Flash developers who have found extremely useful our focused examples of functionality and user interface. Our tutorials have been praised as easy to navigate and put to use, and thorough while staying concise.
This book offers a step-by-step path to learning essential AS3 programming that is based on these popular tutorials.
We hope you visit often and enjoy our Flash and Math website!
