CodeToon: A Comic Authoring Tool Based on Code

The tool created by Suh, Zhao, and Law could soon be used in universities and colleges to make learning to code more engaging. In the future, the researchers would thus like to deploy their tool in real classroom environments to better assess its usefulness. In addition, they plan to investigate the possibility of using generative deep learning models, such as GPT-3 and Codex, to fill any gaps in stories and code.

“CodeToon is an interactive and intelligent comic authoring tool that supports creators to generate stories from code (code→story) and design comics from stories (story→comic),” Zhao and Suh said. “Since comics accurately represent the code semantics and execution process, it enables learners to learn the computational concepts and procedures in an engaging yet effective manner.”

Based on the interview responses, most participants felt that the 1-to-1 mapping of code onto stories and comics could be an effective teaching strategy, particularly when using comics to alternatively represent code. In addition, those who used CodeToon to generate their comics shared positive feedback about its performance in creating code-based stories and comics.

“Our findings confirm previous literature on multiple representational systems, which recommends making the mapping between multiple representations clear,” Zhao said. “Our insights also shed light on other research areas, such as data and stats comics, which can also leverage this approach to automatically generate comics for learning and teaching concepts in their domains.”

“There are many exciting research directions we plan to explore in our next studies,” Suh added. “One is to further improve CodeToon, for example, by ensuring that it supports other programming languages and features. Another is to research how we can use CodeToon to integrate art into programming education.”

CodeToon Link: Beta Version

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