Again, playing the game enabled the students to recognise and resolve the problem of
the behaviour and agency, that the bounce behaviour needed to be attached to the
bullets not the sticks. Making the bullets bounce involved the students in doing some
quite complex programming. I want to suggest that the students’ ease in undertaking
this programming process is in part due to the merger of the game as a narrative and
the multimodal affordances of Toontalk at this point in the game-design. At this
stage of programming the bullet and its context in the game-narrative are visible - in
other words it is the alien that fires the bullets. The visual grammar of the Toontalk
system, in the form of the strip of the program boxes held by the robot, visually and
lexically names the object as a bullet. This visual representation of the game narrative
offers a potential to bring together the semantic field of ‘bullet’ and ‘bounce’ (bullets
as game).
The angle of bounce became a problem in the construction of the game - again this
problem was recognised through playing the game. 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 configuration and arrangement of modes in Toontalk, the multimodal design of
the system, shaped potentials for constructing the entity bounce. Some elements were
visible on screen (foregrounded) while others were not. Semantic meanings were
brought to bear on the construction of the entity through the choice of words. The
designed relationship between the modes of image and movement brought forth the
students’ different potentials for thinking about the entity bounce.
The students’ engagement with the multimodal Toontalk resources serves to reshape
entities, in this case the entity ‘bounce’. The design of these modes within Toontalk
requires students to formalise and increasingly specify the entity bounce within
mathematical terms, and practices such as the estimation of angles, and problem
206