of screen the students worked visually. Once an aspect of the game had been
constructed the students played the game and the movement brought to life their
programming, which often did not work to plan (as I showed in Chapter Four).
During this play the students were engaged in identifying problems with the game.
Game playing was invariably followed by a return to the work of re-planning through
gesture and talk, for reflexive thinking, problem solving and re-planning. In this way
the process of building rules and the game itself was an iterative one of testing and
fixing, and drew on the affordances of image and movement.
The multimodal resources of Toontalk and the screen, in particular movement,
demand that the students engage with different kinds of imaginative work than do the
modes of writing and image on the page. The modes of writing and image in the
paper design did not require the students to think about what produces bounce,
bounce was seen as a reaction and the students’ uncertainty remained unattended to in
this modal representation of the game. The multimodal ensemble of Toontalk offered
the students different potentials for action that shaped how they designed their game
on screen. The students were involved in the selection and ordering of the game
elements in time and space. Much of this work was visually organised. What was
visible on the screen proved to be particularly important throughout each stage of the
game and rule design. When deciding where to attach the bounce behaviour, for
example, if an element was not visible it was not considered a potential candidate.
The students appeared to associate visual presence with agency, ‘if it couldn’t be seen
it couldn’t be acting’ seemed to stand behind the programming process.
Within the Toontalk environment there is no clear reading path or entry point to rule
making, the user∕player has to find her or his own way through the multi-directional
paths. The multimodal affordances of movement, the movement of elements on the
screen and the interaction of the user∕player with the application and the visual
‘demands’ of the environment revealed the ‘ways into’ Toontalk. The task of the
user∕player is, to some extent, to engage with these elements and to find what is
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