Adjusting variables along with other actions

In the "for what it's worth" category, the order of the triggers for an item matters.  If this is common knowledge I apologize for the post but it was news to me.

I was having trouble adjusting variables in a gamified course I'm developing.  I wanted users to receive 10 points for clicking on a particular hotspot and I only wanted them to get the points one time.  If they clicked it again they wouldn't get the 10 points again.  I created two variables: one to store the points and one counter.  The trigger to increase the points would only work if the counter was less than one.  In addition, clicking the hotspot would advance to a new slide.

With that as background the order of the triggers was advance to the new slide, add 10 to the points variable, and add 1 to the counter variable when the user clicked the hotspot but when I published the course it wasn't working.  Clicking the hotspot advanced to the new slide but the points weren't changing.  In playing around trying to fix it I changed the order of the triggers so that the points and counter were adjusted before the trigger that advanced the slide and that fixed the problem.