sequential order. The modal affordances of Toontalk do not represent ‘rule’
separately as condition and action; the spatial dimension of the image and movement
represent ‘rule’ as a fusion of condition and action in both space and time.
In Toontalk the user’s task is to select and order the elements of ‘rule’ made available
to them in order to make sense of the representation of the entity ‘rule’ on screen.
Whereas the entity ‘rule’ is represented as a fixed stable entity within Imagine and
Pathways (consisting of elements organised in a clear relationship with each other)
this is not the case in Toontalk. In Toontalk, ‘rule’ is represented as a more open
entity; the elements and their relationships to one another generate more open
potentials for the user’s design. These different arrangements of the elements of the
entity ‘rule’ suggest that the process of rule making in Imagine and Pathways is
constrained in quite different ways to rule making in Toontalk. Rule making in
Toontalk is a matter of conceptual design, multimodally realised, and part of this
design is the design of the relationship between hierarchical composition of rules and
behaviours.
The subjectivity of the user is effected, and potentially reshaped by, the multimodal
design of Toontalk. Toontalk is realised within a sensory animated cartoon∕game
genre (placing programming clearly within the frame of game). This enables the user
to work with the principles of game via the mediating tools of the program (the
robots, wand, Bammer etc) to engage with mathematical concepts. I suggest that the
genre of the three programs, like other kinds of applications for new technologies, can
bring forth (provide the potentials for) different genres of engagement with them.
Program applications provide users with different kinds of principles for organising
and understanding the world, different coding orientations, each of which is
appropriate to the different versions of the ‘world’ that the program represents as
‘real’. Toontalk foregrounds the social world, the social forces of people and
community (realised by the Toontalk representation of the user on screen, the robots,
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