Doug Ensley

Flash Playground

Since 2005 I have been involved in a joint project with Barbara Kaskosz of the University of Rhode Island that involves the development of tutorials and workshops for training teaching and curriculum professionals in developing teaching and learning material using Adobe Flash. The central components of this project are the MathDL Flash Forum and the website www.flashandmath.com. This project is also supported by an NSF DUE grant (0535327), and it has also resulted in a PREP workshop during the summer of 2007 and another in planning for the summer of 2008.

My largest cohesive collection of Flash comes from the supplementary material for my textbook in Discrete Mathematics.

The following are examples of new ideas:

• Steal This Applet!, a minicourse at 2008 ICTCM
• Splines, an experiment with... well... cubic splines
• Calculus Artist, a graph-drawing toolkit for math instructors
• TransitionManager Class in Flash illustrated
• SlideShow, showing images with transitions, all loaded from external files at runtime
  
• SlideShow tool, versatile xml-based app designed to present Maple animations in a webpage
  
• Envelope of Lines, an ongoing collaboration with Dan Kalman of American University
• Envelope of Lines 2, the sage continues...
• Envelope of Lines 3, a new hope...
• Envelope of Lines, final version on the book site for Dan Kalman's Uncommon Mathematical Excursions: Polynomia and Related Realms, published by the MAA.
• Automatic Differentiation, computing precise numerical derivatives using a simple extension of the MathParser class from www.flashandmath.com
• Multiplication quiz, a little applet I wrote to help my daughter with her times tables.
• A rotating cube prototype (based on work of B. Kaskosz) for the MAA Awards page
• Example Gallery for the book Flash Math Applets: Learn By Example by Doug Ensley and Barbara Kaskosz
• Applet and Information on the Leapin' Lizards puzzle
• The following applets on "Rick Wilson's Tricky Six puzzle" supplement the paper by Richard Guy and Alex Fink in the April 2009 issue of Mathematics Magazine:
  • Practicing the moves on pages 85-86 of the article.
  • Trying the puzzle using the description on page 85 of the article. This is harder than you think!
  • Illustrating the puzzle described in the last paragraph of the article. This also ties in with the cover image for this issue of Mathematics Magazine.
• A collection of statistics applets
• A collection of applets for Math for Liberal Studies, developed with James Hamblin as part of a 2009 grant from the PA State System of Higher Education Faculty Professional Development Council.

---

Contact Information Douglas Ensley, Ph.D. Professor of Mathematics Shippensburg University Shippensburg, PA 17257 Phone: 717.477.1477 Fax: 717.477.4009 E-mail: deensley at ship.edu Web: http://webspace.ship.edu/deensley/ or http://www.dougensley.com