I had some killer midterms this past week. First off, my pop culture midterm was no fun at all. It was multiple choice (my friend, usually), but there were a few questions which looked like something straight out of the textbook. I *hate* those types of questions where they grab a sentence from the textbook. I can’t be expected to memorize a textbook! Mental note to read all the study instructions in the future. I attended every class and I still failed to notice the part of where I should read the ‘online readings’. I guess I missed an article about Bugs Bunny. Woops! There was a question about Bugs Bunny on the midterm and I had no idea what the answer was.
The next midterm was in my Adobe Flash programming class. This was the most intense midterm I’ve ever had. They give you 1.5 hours to complete an animation. You are given the architecture of the assignment, as in how many screens there should be, how the screens interact, and what should happen on each screen. For the purposes of this assignment (hey, I wonder if I can attach my Flash file somewhere to show you?), I had to have a menu screen that fades in the title, then another screen which has a bumblebee fly across the screen, and then another screen that has a car drive over a hill.
Sounds simple but it was killer. For the longest time I couldn’t get the buttons to work and switch between screens. This was worth the most marks and for some reason it wasn’t working. At one point in the class I really got nauseous realizing that I was still working on the navigation and had not hit upon the actual content of the screens yet. My brain must have flicked a switch in the realization of potential failure and I managed to finagle my way out of that predicament. I then went to the car driving across the screen portion and that went along swimmingly.
The bee flying across the screen gave me trouble to no end and at one point when I had actually got it working, I managed to delete all my work on that screen and had to restart and the bee never followed the flight path I assigned to it until midway through. I have no idea how that happened. Argh.
In the end, I started feeling better about the midterm considering I was going in it thinking “I must get everything working 100%” This is how assignments work, right? But then I realized it was a test and that I can definitely accept my usual 75% on this test. I tallied up what I had working on the project and realized that I had done alright. In the end, my bee had a wonky flightpath and my menu screen had a flickering ghost image for the title which wasn’t supposed to be there. Oh, and my buttons were messed up because they were supposed to be on a black background which I failed to read at the beginning. But other than that, it mostly worked so I’m sure I’ll get a decent mark. Now I’m moving into the Adobe Photoshop portion of the course which should be fun.
I have experimented in Flash and Photoshop before and it’s nice to take an actual course in it. You get answers to questions you’ve had along the way. “Why can’t I put a keyframe here?”.