Ideation

Linguistics

Code generation

Philosophy

Comic strip

Computer security

Literature

Narrative

Set (abstract data type)

Coding (social sciences)

Computer science

Code (set theory)

Cognitive science

Comics

Psychology

Storytelling

Sociology

Artificial intelligence

Programming language

Metaphor

Human–computer interaction

Key (lock)

Social science

Multimedia

Recent work demonstrated how we can design and use coding strips, a form of comic strips with corresponding code, to enhance teaching and learning in programming. However, creating coding strips is a creative, time-consuming process. Creators have to generate stories from code (code->story) and design comics from stories (story->comic). We contribute CodeToon, a comic authoring tool that facilitates this code-driven storytelling process with two mechanisms: (1) story ideation from code using metaphor and (2) automatic comic generation from the story. We conducted a two-part user study that evaluates the tool and the comics generated by participants to test whether CodeToon facilitates the authoring process and helps generate quality comics. Our results show that CodeToon helps users create accurate, informative, and useful coding strips in a significantly shorter time. Overall, this work contributes methods and design guidelines for code-driven storytelling and opens up opportunities for using art to support computer science education.

CodeToon: Story Ideation, Auto Comic Generation, and Structure Mapping for Code-Driven Storytelling