Three important points emerge from a multimodal analysis of this instance in relation
to what unfolds in the session as they program the bouncing behaviour. First, the co-
ordination of the two students’ initial talk and gesture appears to show that they have
a shared vision of how they imagine the bullet moving. However, at the point that the
students stop acting in unison, two alternative versions of the movement of the bullet
emerge (that they are alternative versions of events is indicated by the break in the co-
ordination of their activity and Emily’s use of the word ‘or’).
Rachel’s gestures suggest that she is working with the entity ‘bounce’ as a
generalised concept of movement as going from one place to another. Emily appears
to be working with the entity ‘bounce’ as a specific (and more specialised) kind of
movement. Holding her finger on the top-right stick can be read as a gestural sign of
her realisation of ‘bounce’ as a particular kind of movement. Emily understands that a
bullet could not move in a perpendicular line from the top-right to the bottom-right
stick (as gestured by Rachel). In order to ‘imagine’ the movement of the bullet Emily
gesturally traces an ‘imagined’ stick to the right of the alien. This ‘gestural overlay’
adds another stick to the visual design of the game which in turn enables her to
imagine the bullet bouncing from the top-right stick to the bottom-right stick, and
then off past the dog.
The second point to emerge from this multimodal analysis is the students’ uncertainty
of about what it is that ‘produces’ the bounce. Just as their two accounts start
similarly they end similarly. Each account ends with a linguistic (spoken) vagueness,
both in ‘tone of voice’ and in Lexis (R: ‘whatever’, E: ‘try to’ and ‘or something’),
and a gestured vagueness - a change of speed and поп-directed gesture (R wiggles her
pen, E slowly trails her finger off the edge of the screen). I suggest this realisation
marks the students’ uncertainty about how the movement of a bullet would come to
an end if the dog is not hit by it: would the ball keep bouncing, or go off screen? This
is itself an uncertainty of what is producing the bounce - the ball or the something
that is hit by the ball.
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