Teaching Flash is difficult. It exists within the nebulous web development area where the technology is always changing, making technical knowledge and master obsolete sometimes within months of gaining it (CS4 just changed their animation style. I am happy they did leave "classic" animation in there for people like me). Not only is it constantly changing, but Flash can do Everything. It can do 3D. It can create sound on the fly. Flash games are ubiquitous. And now, with AIR, Flash has become a viable desktop programming language.
In a degree where many of the students are focused on becoming designers, and lack that left-brained, logical though process so needed for effective programming, leads to significant difficulty. The problem is that teaching Flash is no longer about web development, or those quick fixes to get the design right and some simple animations working. Now that Flash can do Everything, teaching Flash is analogous to teaching programming. In fact, Actionscript 3.0, the latest version of the scripting language for Flash, looks rather similar to real programming languages such as C#.
What needs to be done is to study the teaching practices from out brothers in computer science. How do they initiate the lay into their realm of expertise? What has worked for the students before, and what has not? Given that a majority of design students have significant spatial ability, and a propensity to learn visually as well, what are the best methods for teaching programming visually? Scratch and the Alice program have replaced text-based programming with a block-based system that has met with some success. Perhaps an Actionscript editor that focuses on visual programming could be a good introduction to Flash programming (or a good feature addition for designers).
