ITP2 - OOP Tutorials - Accessor Methods in Action

The reason our setter methods didn't work is because Ruby thought we
were instantiating local variables. Recall that to instantiate or create
new local variables, all we have to do is x = 1 or str = "hello word".
It turns out that instead of calling the name=, height= and weight=
setter methods, what we did was create three new local variables called
name, height and weight. That's definitely not what we wanted to do.