A Multimodal Framework for Computer Mediated Learning: The Reshaping of Curriculum Knowledge and Learning

Through playing the game the students realised there was a problem with the
movement of the balls. The researcher prompted the students through her gesture,
talk, and use of visualisation, to think about the behaviours they have put on the
bullets. The researcher’s gestured enactment of the movement of the bullets prompted
the students to understand the movement of the bullets in the game as the product of
their programming. The researcher’s use of gesture which, in contrast to the students’,
is on paper and the table surface rather than the screen created a different kind of
‘idealised space’ for the game-design. That is, the researcher’s gestures suggested the
need to think about movement (in this case the angle of movement) outside of the
Toontalk environment.

Discussion

The move from page to screen changes the modes available for meaning making.
Analysis of the students’ interaction with Toontalk, one another and the researcher
shows that learning and mode are connected. The multimodal resources they worked
with foregrounded aspects of the entity bounce in specific ways, which in turn shaped
the students’ construction of the entity bounce and angle.

When designing the game on paper the affordances of writing did not demand that the
agency of elements be explicit. The affordances of visual communication required the
game elements named in the writing to be visually defined and for the relations
between them to be displayed.

The students’ drawing and writing on the worksheet is design in two particular modes
and not the game itself. This initial design is the student’s externalisation of the
notion of game in the modes of drawing and writing but this design is incited by the
students’ understanding of the potentials and genre expectations of Toontalk (and
games for screen more generally). That is, the initial design is informed by the
potentials of movement, sound-effect, ‘catching’, and destroying. The students’
drawing is as an account of the outcome of the game - the bullet comes from the

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