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Purchase Professor Authors Book on HTML5 Programming

HTML5 is in the headlines for possibly reducing the need for computer developers to use Adobe Flash Player. Purchase Professor Jeanine Meyer sheds light on how the new markup language could change the face of the Internet.

Even though most of us have constant access to computers and the Internet, many of us may not have the first idea about how they work.

But that's where Jeanine Meyer comes in. A professor of math and computer science at Purchase College since 2001, Meyer is working with students this semester to program games and become acquainted with the new HTML5.

HTML5 has made the news recently because the markup language it uses could make the Adobe Flash player obsolete. When you open a browser program like Internet Explorer or Firefox, the browser interprets the HTML code to produce what you see on your computer screen. 

In her book, The Essential Guide to HTML5: Using Games to Learn HTML5 and JavaScript, Meyer uses a non-intimidating approach to this topic.

Though the differences compared to the previous HTML version may not be noticed by the layman, she said HTML5 makes it much easier to produce applications like a video clip displayed as a ball bouncing in a box. (An example of a video ball ricochet game created using HTML5 can be found on Meyer's website.)

Students in Meyer's two courses this semester tackle this topic through various projects. Using the previous version of HTML, Meyer's students in a lower-level course called Programming Games create games ranging from Black Jack to find the mole. In an upper-level course called Creating User Interfaces, students create games, but also analyze website userability and experiment with HTML5.

Meyer notes that while today's students may go directly into a computer programming course, when she was in college at the University of Chicago, there wasn't even a computer major.

She majored in mathematics and worked for a professor who was just getting acquainted with computers. Her interest peaked and she became a systems analyst for IBM. She then earned her Ph.D. in computer science from New York University.

She said that her father first inspired her interest in math, because he enjoyed doing different types of puzzles.

"He would give them to me to do; I think he did it intentionally," Meyer joked. "I think he thought that the math and sciences would lead to good professions for both of his daughters."

While Meyer is now involved in the academic realm of math and computers and her sister is an engineer, she said that fewer people seem to be going into math, science and computing nowadays.

"We do have the new media major [at Purchase] that has a technical part of it, but it seems like people across the U.S. aren't going into math, science and computing. It's important to have a sense of how this technology works," she said.

Meyer teaches New Media majors, who are required to take a computer programming course.

"We think it's important for people to work as creators, but also have a sense of what the underlying programming is."

She noted that hyperlocal new media websites like Patch are entirely dependent upon the language of computers.

"Hyperlocal news is a phenomenon that's dependent upon technology, so I think it's important to know something about it," she said.

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