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Flash Tools for Developers: Truth Tables and Logic - Outline of the Developer's Guide

Author(s): 
Doug Ensley and Barbara Kaskosz

The following outline describes what can be accomplished by following the Truth Table Developer's Guide after downloading all source files to your machine with Flash 8 installed.

  1. Getting started. Download and unzip the relevant files including the documented source code and the detailed doc file with instructions for customization.
  2. The First Template. An overview of the structure of the Flash source file tt3vars.fla is given, and two customization tasks are undertaken to give the instructor a sense for how the application works.
    1. Changing the names of the variables. In order to use different variable names, we must make changes to the script in the calls to the TruthParser constructor and each evaluation of the logical expression. In addition, the corresponding changes to the static text on the stage (column labels and instructions) are equally important to the user.
    2. Changing the number of variables. We create a new Flash movie called tt2vars.fla that builds truth tables in two variables instead of three.  This task is only more complicated in the sense that it requires more changes to the existing movie, but each change is just as easy as those made in previous task.
  3. The Second Template. An overview of the structure of the Flash source file tt3xml.fla is given, and we discuss how it communicates with the XML data file tt3problems.xml.  In particular, we provide an alternative method for specifying the logical expressions to be used in a problem set.
  4. Reference. For those developers who would like more detail on the handling of XML data files in Flash, we include a reference to a short article on this subject written for the MathDL Flash Forum by the authors of this guide.

Doug Ensley and Barbara Kaskosz, "Flash Tools for Developers: Truth Tables and Logic - Outline of the Developer's Guide," Convergence (July 2006)