place it on the back of an object. They decide, wrongly, to place the bounce
behaviour on the sticks in the game.
In fact, in order for the game to work as the students intend it to they need to attach
the bounce behaviour to the bullets. (Knowing this, the researcher persuades the
students to program one stick.) In everyday terms it might be the ‘sticks’ that are
thought to ‘carry’ the property of producing bounce - the sticks interrupt the
movement of the bullets and in doing so ‘produce’ the bounce. The students are likely
to have experience of a ball bouncing differently on different surfaces, from which
they may deduce (correctly) that bounce is connected with a surface. I want to
suggest it is the students’ everyday experiences that bring the ‘sticks’ into the realm
of programming bounce. Further, I want to suggest that the students’ use of bounce in
their everyday talk does not ‘fit’ easily with the semantic field of bullet. As shown
earlier the word ‘bounce’ brought forth the student’s transformation of the object
from a bullet to a ball: bullets are hard, they do not ‘have’ bounce. It is this everyday
understanding of bounce as a quality rather than a specific kind of movement that
opens up the potential for the sticks to be what makes them bounce. This ambiguity
of agency can persist in the multimodal representation of the entity bounce as a
mathematical entity in the Toontalk behaviour ‘action-state’ (figure 5.6 a.). In the
‘action-state’ an image of a spring is shown moving (bouncing) between two ‘bars’.
When the students took the spring out of the anima-gadget notebook it moved in a
straight line. Reading this behaviour from an everyday perspective it is perhaps easy
to understand the thinking that led the students to program the bouncing behaviour
onto the ‘sticks’ in their game. They assumed that the sticks produced the bounce.
194