Flash Questions

I am interviewing this week and my applicant (may be a subscriber) has put down Flash Intermediate.

I’m looking for suitable questions to test this calim anyone come up with some good ones. I can do A 5 min set scenario if I want

just make them do some basic animation. I’m not sure what intermediate implies, but maybe have some tween, AS and OOP exercises?

If your real life name doesn’t happen to be Laslett, you could ask him if he knows Laslett from the kirupaforums. If he says he has never heard of the name, you should roll up your paper and hit him a few times :stuck_out_tongue:

If he has never heard of the forums - you should give him a hug and tell him its a BAD place to go. He is bound to become a member for sure that way. People like doing things they aren’t supposed to do…(runs over and frollicks around a brush fire)

If he does say that he has heard of the forums and has asked lostinbeta for preloader help, you should hit him a few times again.


I really am not sure what serious questions to ask. You may want to ask him if he knows any AS, how comfortable he is with doing simple things like going between frames using gotoAndPlay, tweening, and maybe even a simple preloader. Ask him if he knows a bit about Flash usability.

You may also want to ask him what the drawbacks of using Flash actually are. I’ve found that beginners tend to think that Flash is the next best thing to sliced brea…salami. So if he says something like “Flash is good for X reasons, but HTML is better for these Y reasons.” he knows enough about Flash to know its limitations.

:cap:

OOP might be pushing it a bit.

try asking him to design a pseudo-preloader (in other words, explain in writing, not code) for a movie.

if you’re gonna ask actionscript questions, don’t make them too difficult. when he put down intermediate, he may be referring to his knowledge around drawing, tweening (ugh…), frame manipulation, layers, stop();, gotoAndPlay();, etc. Can’t ask him to code a prototype function for a MovieClip that eases its motion down once it hits some threshold (hm…that’s a good one. writes down). rather, ask him something like this, “write the code to jump to any random frame within the range of the movieclip once the movie is loaded”.

For general flash skills, here’s a sample true/false off the top of my head:

T/F: Gradients require at least one color definition in order to be valid. (of course not, minimum is two)

Multiple choice:

Which of the following does not process actionscript code:
a) Frames
b) Groups
c) Buttons
d) MovieClips

(fairly obvious)

and last:

When one layer masks another layer in the timeline, the layer on top represents _______ and the bottom layer represents ________.

a) the mask; the layer to be masked
b) the layer to be masked; the mask

(fairly straightforward and obvious answer, but you never know ;))

I am interviewing this week and my applicant (may be a subscriber) has put down Flash Intermediate.

I’m looking for suitable questions to test this calim anyone come up with some good ones. I can do A 5 min set scenario if I want

Depends, what do you define as “intermediate level”?

:lol:

When I went to a co-op interview about a month ago, I was asked to do a short quiz on HTML and CSS, about 30 questions long, mostly multiple choice with some fill in the blank. It was a lot like what Thor mentioned. Ask them things that are really basic along with things that are a little more intermediate, and then you might even throw in a couple of questions that either don’t have a direct answer or are just way to complex for anyone to do off the top of their head. See if they guess, make something up that seems logical, make something completely ridiculous up with lots of big meaningless technical words, or just admit they don’t know (although maybe they’ll say they know where to get the answer on the Internet or in a book). You can determine a lot about a person by how they act when they don’t know an answer. Good luck :thumb:

After I posted this I did think of doing something like that but though do I really want the people at work to link my user name to the real me.

Well the candidate failed miserablty, it appears that Flash Intermediate is knowing tweening and how to tween a bee along a path, so he’d done the tutorial from version 4

you could just have him sit down at a computer and see how easily he interacts w/ flash, ie have him make a circle, convert it to a symbol, tween it, add AS, etc etc…

:slight_smile:

:p: < how creative (-:

well, what did you end up asking him?