What's this Master's about, anyways?

Money falling from heaven?
There's a voice inside my head that keeps saying "Just do it!" (You can see him below, as a simple Flash animation sequence) He's right, it's time to answer the question...

My interest is in the intersection of games, business and education. Specifically, learning about accounting and finance, in particular cash flow. The big idea: design a game that demonstrates cash flow as a system, in particular a plumbing system. Yes, it's Joe the Plumber meets the cash flow of a company. Quick Joe, fix it! Before we run out of water! Sorry, a bit of a digression.

To gather my thoughts I created the slide presentation below to talk about my design process, how I came up with this idea, and why.

As I doing this, I realized a fundamental flaw in process. I started with the technology instead of the learning objectives. I jumped to the conclusion that I needed to create a game, and therefore I need to learn Flash to create this game. And therefore I need to learn Actionscript, right? As I was explaining this I realized I am making this very complicated.

This learning Flash soup-to-nuts...well, I'll never get my Masters done if I go down that rabbit hole. This is the constant struggle with this work, there's always another paper I feel I need to read, another technology that I need to learn. Yes, I want to do it all, but do I have to do it all right now? Is there an easier way to achieve the learning objectives that I want, create a game, but not necessarily one that is so dependent on learning Flash Actionscript 3. Time to take a step back and examine this from another perspective.

About the Flash files: Money Falling from Heaven: is modified version of the Animated Object exercise that I got from Gary Rosenzweig's Game Programming University. The 3 flash files in this post are respectively 2k ($ falling, actionscript only), 9k (animated flash), and 118k (slide show in flash - not the best use of the medium).