made available by Toontalk, still image, colour, movement, and sound-effect
contributes to the construction of these entities in specific ways.
The entity ‘rule’ is transformed from a conglomerate of the students’ everyday
experience and knowledge to the criterial elements that are significant to the
mathematical concepts embedded in Toontalk, that is action, condition, and agency.
In the students’ game design on paper the entity ‘rule’ is formulated as a written
narrative sequence of events and a visual display of the outcome of the rules of the
game. Here rule is a fixed entity and condition and action are ‘bundled’ together. The
move to the multimodal resources of screen and Toontalk require the notion of rule to
be re-specified as consisting of separate entities to be attached to particular elements
in the game. On entering Toontalk the entity rule is embedded in the city level of the
game and the notion of condition and action are implicit but not defined. As the
user∕player lands the helicopter and he or she nears the potential to construct rules
they are increasingly positioned through the modes displayed on screen as being in
control of the objects on screen. The configuration of these resources on screen mark
the entity ‘rule’ as something that requires a particular location in order to ‘work’. For
instance, on landing the helicopter on the ground the player character jumps out of it,
or on instructing the character to kneel the toolbox automatically opens. This link
between the behaviour of the player, location and movement (action) on screen can
be read as an emerging ‘definition’ of the entities ‘condition’ and ‘action’. The game
environment of the city is a meta-level multimodal representation of the entity ‘rule’
and it suggests that rule building is not a question of being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but
something that can be built, deconstructed, rebuilt, played with and amended. Rule is
reshaped from a relatively fixed entity, to an open, iterative process with multiple
possibilities. As the user∕player moves to the Toontalk behaviour level the entity
‘rule’ is represented as consisting of two parts, that is, action and condition.
However, these elements are not labelled as such and one of the tasks of the
user∕player is to distinguish between these elements of ‘rule’. Modes are central to
this process as they are used to name and classify action and condition: the condition
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