Using Parent Elements

Hi.

What I understand is that your teacher wants to create a chain reaction in which the click on the golf tee kicks off the whole process.

Then, in the last frame of each symbol instance of your machine, you fire up an event like "go" and "pop".

After that, every single subsequent instance that should react must be listening to previous event of the previous instance in the queue.

So you have:

GolfTee symbol:

[First frame]

import flash.events.MouseEvent;
function startAnimation(m:MouseEvent)
{
    gotoAndPlay(2);
}
stop();
addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, startAnimation);

[Last frame]

import flash.events.Event;
var e:Event = new Event("go"); // fires up the "go" event that will be listened by the Ball instance
dispatchEvent(e);

Ball symbol:

[First frame]

import flash.events.Event;
function startAnimation(e: Event)
{
    gotoAndPlay(2);
}
stop();
MovieClip(root).tee.addEventListener("go", startAnimation); // listen to the "go" event

[Last frame]

import flash.events.Event;
var ev:Event = new Event("pop"); // fires up the "pop" event that will be listened by the Rec instance
stop();
dispatchEvent(ev);

Rec symbol

[First frame]

import flash.events.Event;
function startAnimation(e: Event)
{
    gotoAndPlay(2);
}
stop();
MovieClip(root).ball.addEventListener("pop", startAnimation); // listen to the "pop" event

[Last frame]

stop();
// so on...

About your questions:

- gotoAndPlay(2) is a instruction to play the current timeline starting from the frame 2. As this code lives in the Ball instance, it will play the timeline of Ball instance.

- With this line...

parent.getChildAt(parent.getChildIndex(this)-1).addEventListener("go",startAnimation);

... your teacher is trying to get the tee symbol in the main timeline. It will work as long as you don't change the number of instances in the main timeline or the z index of the ball and the tee. I recommend you to use MovieClip(root).nameOfYourInstance like I did in the sample above. Because it doesn't depend on the number of children or z index.

- Your teacher just didn't follow a pattern. But the name of the Event variables don't really need to be the same. You can call them e and/or ev and/or event. Just try to be consistent.

Please let us know if this clarifies things for you.

Regards,

JC