Comics, Programming, Children and Narratives

Studies of how 10 to 11 year old children understand eventbasedprogram descriptions based on comic strips showed thatnarrative interpretations of such programs were common. A narrativeperspective was taken both when using paper prototypes and computerprototypes, but was stronger on paper than on the computer. While anarrative model of programming can interfere with the creation ofnon-linear simulation-oriented programs, a classroom study showedthat the children were able to use a narrative perspective onprogramming to create story-based games with interactive agents.Thus, visual event-based programming could be an alternative tohypertext authoring for the creation of interactive stories where adynamic content is considered important.

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