springs. The absorbent violet can be interpreted as a Signifier of the lack of energy of
the barriers. The children’s everyday experience of ‘bounce’ as a general
uncontrolled movement, such as a highly bouncy ball is excluded from the Toontalk
concept ‘bounce’. The resources of image, movement, and writing work together to
define ‘bouncing’ within the mathematical paradigm of the system.
In the action-state the multimodal representation of ‘bouncing’ is not formulated as a
rule but as an action. Action is foregrounded. Condition is entirely backgrounded in
the representation, in a sense condition is represented as context (the barriers that are
‘hit’ by the moving object).
In the bouncing behaviour edit-state the colour and image of the spring is the same as
that of the action-state. Image serves visually to mediate the two states of a
‘behaviour’. In the edit-state the mode of writing is increased and given equal
salience with the image. The resources of compositional information value are
designed to modally divide the edit-state of the bounce behaviour. I show that this
composition signifies a valuation of the modes of representation in the context of the
behaviours, and an idealised progression from word to image to program code.
In the edit-state the image of a spring continues to foreground action rather than
condition. The multimodal representation of bouncing in the edit-state is however
formulated as a rule in terms of condition and action. The writing T bounce off things
when I hit them’ presents the behaviour as a rule. The use of T and the
decontextualised image of the spring both suggest that behaviour is a property
belonging to an object. In programming, the work of the student is to specify which
game-object the T refers to. The user is required to select the object that the bounce
behaviour should be attached to. The entity rule is also represented in the program
code shown in the top right quarter of the edit-state - which also although not
foregrounded by its size, is present nonetheless.
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