Playing the Game
It was the visual experience of playing the game that led the students to realise their
mistake and how to rectify it. In this episode (shown in transcript 5.3) the students
program the sticks to bounce. They then place the sticks on the game. When they
played the game the sticks bounced off. In working out ‘what happened’ the students
realise that they should have programmed the bullets to bounce rather than the sticks.
Through their engagement with the multimodal resources of Toontalk the students
worked out their ambiguities about agency that were not challenged or required to be
resolved by the design on paper through drawing∕image and talk.
Making the Bullets Bounce
The students realise that in order for the game to work as they intend they need to
program the bounce onto the bullets. During the next 20 minutes of the session the
students play the game to clarify the problem, program the bullets, save the game, and
label it in the Toontalk note-book. The bullets (as mentioned earlier) are not visible
except when playing the game. Rachel asks in frustrated and plaintive tones, “Where
are we going to get a bullet?”. At which point Emily realises that the bullets are ‘in’
the alien.
The programming process of finding and re-programming the bullets is shown in
figure 5.13. The student flips over the alien object to find the behaviour T fire in four
directions’ that is attached to it. She then has to deconstruct this behaviour into its
four ‘directional’ behaviours. Working with the behaviour T fire a white bullet to the
left when you press the left arrow’ the student selects and deconstructs elements of
the code by removing the white bullet from the object box of the program code. She
then flips over the white bullet object and changes the program code by adding the
bounce behaviour to the bullet. Repeating these steps in reverse she reconstructs the
code. The student visually interacts with the screen and physically manipulates the
mouse and keys. There is little talk involved in the programming apart from the
student’s spoken
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