Three researchers at University of Waterloo in Canada have recently developed a unique comic authoring tool that can automatically create stories and comics based on code. This system, called CodeToon, could open interesting .
October 13, 2022
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Three researchers at University of Waterloo in Canada have recently developed a unique comic authoring tool that can automatically create stories and comics based on code. This system, called CodeToon, could open interesting possibilities for code-driven storytelling, the process of using computational code to create new stories.
Sangho Suh, one of the authors, came up with the idea for CodeToon and then worked on its development in collaboration with his colleague Jian Zhao, under the supervision of Prof. Edith Law. Their paper, set to be presented in a few weeks at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), the premier forum for innovations in human-computer interfaces, builds on some of their team’s previous efforts, including the development of a pedagogical tool called Coding Strip and another study leveraging generative conversational AI to teach computational thinking.
„We found that using comics is an effective means for teaching abstract programming concepts, but crafting the comics is tedious and time-consuming,“ Jian Zhao, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. „We also identified the opportunities in advanced AI technologies for automating some steps of this task. Thus, we built CodeToon, a comic authoring tool that facilitates this code-driven storytelling process.“
Coding Strip, the pedagogical tool previously created by Sangho Suh and his colleagues at University of Waterloo, was specifically designed to teach programming concepts using comics. CodeToon takes this idea one step further, by automatically creating code-based comics and stories that could be used to train computer science students.
„Inspired by the ladder of abstraction and its relationship to computational thinking, coding strip helps learners move between concrete (comic) and abstract (code) levels of abstraction,“ Sangho Suh, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. „Creating coding strips, however, can be time-consuming and laborious, so the primary objective of this project was to make the authoring process more efficient and effortless.“
CodeToon can facilitate code-driven storytelling in two distinct ways.
