On July 6 I'm planning on heading down to the Hershey Medical Center to meet the assistant professor, whom I'm setting up the demo Flash simulation for. I had a long chat with him on the phone and got a clearer idea of what he was trying to accomplish. He's looking to be able to have people who are not Flash developers be able to create simulations without too much trouble. I explained to him that the work would be all up front in getting the Flash file created that would run the sim, and that after that was created, it was basically a matter of creating graphics (backgrounds, photos, images) and inputting data into a FileMaker DB. Once a flow diagram was set up, this could easily be done by almost anyone with a little knowledge.
I also began to look at how to make games in Flash. I thought by doing a knock-off of a popular Flash game, I might gain some valuable experience in game creation. I am taking the game Tonti and sort of backwards engineering it. This is what I had to do for the All-Sports Museum Kiosk I've been working on. Tonti is sort of like "Whack-A-Mole", only you use your number keys to "whack" the Tonti character that emerges from one of the 9 holes. Just to save time, I took a few screenshots of different elements of the game and dropped them into Flash. I was able to get this to the point where the Tonti characters would emerge from their holes at random. It was actually a bit easier than I thought once I started poking around in Flash. Maybe I can eventually make a game that teaches you how to type with this concept.