CodingToon: Using Authoring Tool to Create Concept-driven Comics for Programming Concepts

One of the main challenges with teaching and learning programming is the abstract nature of its concepts and procedures. To address this, recent work suggested using comics. Specifically, they proposed coding strip, a form of comic strip accompanied by its corresponding code, and demonstrated how they can be designed and used in classrooms. Their subsequent in-class study revealed that students enjoy learning with coding strips and benefit from them in various ways. Unfortunately, creating comics can be a time-consuming and challenging task; this can compromise the usefulness and adoption of coding strips. Thus in this demo, we introduce CodingToon, an authoring tool for coding strips, and provide a brief tutorial to help interested instructors use coding strips in their classrooms. The authoring process shown in the demo follows a concept-driven storytelling process that can be extended to support the creation of explanations on concepts beyond programming concepts. A laptop or tablet is recommended but not required.