Getting Started with Macromedia Director 7.

A Hands-on Introduction to One of the Most Popular Authoring Environments.

Michael Schacht Hansen

Section for Health Informatics, University of Aarhus, Denmark.

Abstract:

Macromedia Director has become one of the most popular tools for authoring educational software. It has reached this position by being very powerful and yet manageable for non-programmers. Director has however a reputation for having a very steep learning curve and many people give up on it. This preworkshop tutorial will give a brief introduction to the environment and then move straight on to practical examples of how to get things done. The program will be divided into a morning session where everything is done by pointing and clicking with the mouse and an afternoon session where the attendees will get a first taste of Directors very powerful scripting language Lingo.

The following topics will be covered:

• Introduction to the environment. Understanding the Director metaphor.
• Basic animation (without scripts).
• Basic navigation (using the behaviors that ship with Director).
• An introduction to scripting in director.
• Creating the first behavior.
• Deployment. Standalone application or the Web.

Benefits in attending:

The attendees will get a basic understand of the Macromedia Director authoring environment. Director is not something that can be mastered in a day, but this introduction will help the participants to get past the first few hurdles.