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

TL;DR

CodeToon is a tool that streamlines the creation of coding comic strips by transforming code into stories and automatically generating comics, thereby enhancing programming education and reducing authoring time.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method combining metaphor-based story ideation and automatic comic generation for code-driven storytelling, with empirical evaluation.

Findings

CodeToon enables faster creation of coding comics.

Participants produced accurate and informative comics.

The tool improves the storytelling process in programming education.

Abstract

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.