Our Portfolio of Multimedia Authoring

Essay Per

Multimedia Authoring is a course given on the VU University, by Anton Eliens. I already knew mister Eliens from the course Project Interactive Multimedia. Not surprisingly, he had made a messy website for the course, for the purpose of creativity. The goal of Multimedia Authoring is to build an application where learning aspects are included. To achieve this, we must team up in groups of two, and create an online portfolio, just like in Project Interactive Multimedia. This portfolio page must contain a couple of pages; a built-in mediaviewer, a page with our basic concept, a page with our created moodboard in brainstorming, an online drawing function and of course our online application. The last page contains the essays of me and Kevin about the progress of the project.

Multimedia Authoring 2015 looked at first to me as a course in some manner similar to Project Interactive Multimedia in the first academic year of Information, Multimedia and Management. I liked the setup of that course, and I thought this course would have the same free implementation on the project. This open setup stimulates creativity and free time scheduling. Apparently this was the case for Multimedia Authoring. I partnered up with Kevin, who I met via a facebook message to find partners. The first impressions were good, and we quickly had a few options for our project.

We first had the idea to make a word game. Players get a few letters, and try to put them in the right order to make a word. Then they click confirm, and gain points. We started this project with searching some background information about JavaScript. I used mostly W3Schools and StackOverflow to learn how to program this with JavaScript. However, after trying a lot of different ways I discovered that making such a program would take much more time than expected, and my level of JavaScript skill wasn't sufficient either. After some further brainstorming, we decided we would make an eye-hand coordination improving game, especially focused on young children, to learn them use the keyboard and the computer.

Unfortunately, after a few weeks we had a big personal problem. Kevin's mother had major health issues, and therefore Kevin wasn't able to work any more on the project. This caused some serious delay, but luckily we had the opportunity to hand in the project later this academic year. After the personal problems were mostly behind us, we decided to get off with a fresh start, and that helped us considerably. Kevin would take over the programming bits, and I would complete the basic functions of our portfolio, including the new concept and a mediaviewer.

The change of the basic functionalities of the portfolio took longer than expected, especially because I had to spend most of the time on other courses in February and March. I had found various examples of how the mediaviewer could be implemented, eventually I chose to make several HTML pages containing the different pictures. Then I made thumbnails to make clear for the user which picture they enlarge.

In the course Multimedia Authoring I have learned some basic JavaScript, although I did not use it in the final product. I especially learned how to deal with drawbacks, and plan working on the project within a full agenda. It was not always easy to combine the project with other courses and my work, and besides also plan time with Kevin to work on the project together. In the end the sessions working together on the same topics have helped the most, and have resulted in a good final delivery.