Part of Lesson Plan: Animating Objects Programmatically-Animating an Analog Clock face: Part1

Activity Overview / Details

After students have saved and exited their flash document of the clock...

Independent  Practice and Assessment

Tell the students they will then open a Flash document with an error in it and that they have to figure out what the error could be. (do not tell the students this, but the error is  that an objcet has not been instantiated).

When they open the Flash document "minuteHand.fla", they will quickly see that the object on the stage looks indeed like a minute hand.

Students will then test their movie to see the error appear in the compiler window.

Observe the error.

The teacher will say...

"What do you think access of undefined property minutes_mc means?"

(hopefully, the students will say sometihing along the lines of "the object was not instantiated")

confirm that students understand that the error explains the object was not instantiated

Then the teacher has the students exit out of the flash player and then open the actionscript (by pressing the F9 key).

Students observe the actionscript

The teacher will then say

"What this code means is that there is this object called minutes_mc and it has an associated property which tells the object to rotate by 6 degrees."

"By the way, as a side note, the rotation property takes values ranging from -180 to 180 degrees"