California Career and Technical Education Standards

• IT.B.B2.1 Know multiple ways in which to transfer information and resources (e.g., text, d...

California Academic Content Standards (Reinforced)

• ELA.9-10.R.CAGT.2.6 Demonstrate use of sophisticated learning tools by following technical direction...2

• Overview - Lecture

  Overview

  Explain to students that throughout the next few days, they will learn how to create an XML music player using AS3.

  Because our music player uses a markup language called XML, today, we will need to learn a little bit about XML.

  Teacher explains...

  "The songs to be played in our player will be specified in an external file so that the player loads each song as required. The songs in the player can be updated by simply updating the external playlist file so that you do not have to go back to the FLA each time to update your music player when you want to change your songs around."

  In this lesson, we will learn and make use of a few types of classes. .. the XML Class and the Sound Class .

  We will also learn more about  event handling, conditionals and functions.

  Vocabulary

  Teacher should hand out this vocabulary sheet which explains not only the key terms listed below, but also ones used in the prior lesson

  Lets first learn a few of these terms...

  Flash Movie

  An animation in the Flash format that uses the .SWF extension. This doesn't actually mean it plays a movie or movie files.

  Runtime

  When a program is running, or executing, it is said to be in runtime.

  XML

  Extensible Markup Language ( XML) is a set of rules for encoding document. XML was designed to transport and store data. Dont get it confused with HTML. HTML was designed to display data.

  Loader Class

  So again, the songs to be played in our player will be specified in an external file so that the player loads each song as required. We will use the Loader Class to do this...

  The Loader Class is an ActionScript class that lets us load external assets (such as images and Flash files) at run time onto a Flash movie. Using such technique makes our Flash song player more efficient as you load specific music files only when needed instead of embedding them regardless of whether the user ends up listening to them or not. Separating our final, embeddable movie into distinct sections loaded at run time makes the website easier to update as you can update the external assets without going back to the main FLA. So we will learn to use the Loader Class to load an external asset, which in our case is our XML file.

  Event Handling

  Event handling is the process by which any sort of interactivity is created in ActionScript 3.0. You could make your Flash movie jump to life, whether it was by reacting to a mouse click, a keyboard stroke, or any event happening in Flash using the Event Handling system of AS3.

  Conditionals

  Conditionals are special tools that add logic to an ActionScript program by taking an action only upon the satisfaction of a specified condition. Conditionals are easy to understand and are guaranteed to appear in any ActionScript project you work on. The most commonly used conditionals are the "if" conditional and the "else" and "else if" conditionals.

  Function

  Functions are a powerful feature in ActionScript that make it possible to reuse blocks of code throughout a flash movie in great flexibility. Using functions saves the programmer a massive amount of time, they can be used to centralize the code so that everything can be controlled, edited and updated from a single point and they also make the code much more easier to read by other people. There are two types of functions in ActionScript: built-in functions and custom functions.

  W3C

  The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards. Led by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe, W3C's mission is to lead the Web to its full potential. 

  • Sound Player Vocabulary Sheet 1.pdf [ Download ]
• Guided Practice - Guided Practice

  Guided Practice

  Intro to XML Worksheet

  Prior to introducing the content below, download and extract these three worksheets:

  Introduction to XML_partners copy to read.pdf

  Introduction to XML_blank.pdf

  Introduction to XML_answers_teacher_version.pdf

  1. Gather students into pairs and explain that 2 worksheets will be handed out. One person in the pair will read the worksheet titled "Introduction to XML".
  2. Meanwhile the other person will listen to what their group member is saying and fill in the blanks of the 2ndworksheet
  3. Hand out both worksheets to each group. The worksheet titled "Introduction to XML" and the worksheet titled "Introduction to XML(fill in the blanks)"
  4. Give students ample time to completely fill in all the blanks of their team's worksheet.

   

  Explain that we will be making an XML Document today to store our playlist for our music player. Then during our next lesson, our XML playlist file will contain all necessary song details in it.

  Before Making Our XML Document, We Will Need to Set Up our Files

   

  Preparing External Assets

  These are the songs we use in this lesson download them here

  song info:

  track1    -   Tilte: "Party Rock Anthem"      Artist: LMFAO  
  track2    -   Title: "Bust a Move"       Artist: Young MC
  track3    -   Title: "I Love College Dance REMIX Instrumental"      Artist: Asher Roth

   

  The teacher explains...

  "Now, we will all need to have some .mp3 files at hand.

  For future reference, just know we can also use any .mp3 file we have on your machine, but make sure that it is in .mp3 format and no other as Flash can only play this format."

  1. Have each student download and extract these 3 .mp3 files.
  2. Once each student has their .mp3 files, have them start off by creating a folder for this project somewhere on their computer. Title this folder "sound_player"
  3. Inside this folder have them create a new folder to host their .mp3 files.
  4. Have students name this folder audio.

  

  1. Inside the audio folder, have students place their three .mp3 files.
  2. To make this easier and to minimize the risk of typos, make sure all students rename their mp3 files to track1, track2, and track3.

  

  Their .mp3 files are now ready...

  Preparing the XML Playlist file

  Teacher explains...

  "We will create our XML file now. The XML file will play the role of a playlist as it will have the details of the tracks that we want to play. Again, an XML file is essentially a text file with user-defined structured coding. We may use any simple text editor to create our  XML file, but today, we will use notepad."

  1. Have students open the notepad program and save a blank file as playlist.xml in their project folder along with your audio folder.

  

  Teacher explains...

  "In the next lesson, we are going to edit our XML playlist file with the information that we need to run our player. Our XML file will have the details of our songs, specifically:

  • The URL of the song file.
  • The title of the song.
  • The name of the artist singing the song.

  These will translate into the XML code shown below:"

  Just show the students this code, do not have them type or add the code until the next lesson

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <PLAYLIST> <SONG URL="audio/track1.mp3" TITLE="Party Rock Anthem" ARTIST="LMFAO" /> <SONG URL="audio/track2.mp3" TITLE="Bust a Move" ARTIST="Young MC"/> <SONG URL="audio/track3.mp3" TITLE="I Love College Dance REMIX Instrumental" ARTIST="Asher Roth" /> </PLAYLIST>

   

  • songs.zip [ Download ]
  • Introduction to XML_partners copy to read.pdf [ Download ]
  • Introduction to XML_blank.pdf [ Download ]
  • Introduction to XML_answers_teacher_version.pdf [ Download ]