An Interactive Book Authoring Tool to Introduce Programming

Logic in Schools

Andr

e Campos

, Alberto Signoretti

and M

ario Rodrigues

DIMAp, Federal University of RN - UFRN, Natal, Brazil

DI, State University of RN - UERN, Natal, Brazil

ESTGA/IEETA, University of Aveiro - UA, Aveiro, Portugal

Keywords:

Computational Thinking, Storytelling, Digital Interactive Book, Computer Science Education.

Abstract:

In the past years, there was a growing interest in teaching computational thinking in elementary and high

school institutions. Although the idea is spread and well accepted among academics, it has been rarely put

in practice in the classrooms. Currently, when a programming-related activity is offered, with some few ex-

ceptions, it is usually presented as an extra-curricular (optional) activity. However, it does not need to be

disassociated from the common school curriculum. The present work is based on the idea that programming

logic can be used transversally with different subjects, such as history, geography, science, literacy, mathemat-

ics, among others. The authors envisage to accomplish this goal by enabling programming as a supporting tool

for teachers and students, allowing them to create digital interactive books. The tool, named piBook, has its

main focus in the production of interactive storytelling using non-linear narratives. Besides, it is also possible

to create textual games (such as role-playing games), interactive activities (such as quizzes), tutorials, chatbots

and similar applications.

1 INTRODUCTION

Recent articles has shown the importance of align-

ing the education of “digital natives” (Prensky, 2009)

with the development of digital skills and compe-

tences (Leonard et al., 2016). However, a consid-

erable number of schools still do not address this

need. In several schools, computers are being primar-

ily used as tools for information research, text editing

and presentations. In some contexts, computers are

also used as a motivational tool for learning, through

the use of games and playful digital activities (Felicia,

2014). However, even in these latter cases, there is

no direct stimulus for the students to know how these

games and applications are built.

Knowing how to use tools is the most basic rela-

tionship one can have with technology, which differs

signiﬁcantly from knowing how to apply concepts to

construct them. In the today digital society, this abil-

ity is highly appreciated in any career. Furthermore,

knowing or identifying the logic behind a computer-

based solution can help the student’s autonomy to

solve objective problems by developing the ability to

think in a systematical and critical way (Wing, 2006).

Ten years after Jeanette Wing’s inﬂuential article,

where the term Computational Thinking was coined

(Wing, 2006), the idea has still not been widely

adopted. Despite the growing interest in the subject,

there is a huge difﬁculty in putting her ideas into prac-

tice, especially in countries with strong resistance to

change or to provide more ﬂexibility to their scholar

curriculum. As a consequence, several educational in-

stitutions that adopt computational thinking and cor-

related activities, usually do so through extracurricu-

lar activities, following the learn-to-code movement

(Kafai and Burke, 2014).

Several institutions and entities worldwide have

been supporting this movement in the last years. This

is mainly due to the stimulus that programming offers

to logical thinking, creativity, reasoning and problem

solving through abstractions and decompositions (Lye

and Koh, 2014). Therefore, it is critical to spend ef-

forts in introducing computational thinking and, more

speciﬁcally, programming logic in the early years of

education.

The present work is complementary to the exist-

ing learn-to-code initiatives in extracurricular activ-

ities. However, differently from them, it considers

that teaching programming logic does not necessar-

ily have to be disconnected from the current existing

140

Campos, A., Signoretti, A. and Rodrigues, M.

An Interactive Book Authoring Tool to Introduce Programming Logic in Schools.

DOI: 10.5220/0006333501400148

In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2017) - Volume 1, pages 140-148

ISBN: 978-989-758-239-4

school contents. In other words, it can be transver-

sally used on diverse subjects, such as history, geogra-

phy, science, literacy, mathematics, foreign language,

among others. For this, it is necessary to embed the

use of programming logic into the existing learning

activities, so that it can be part of a teaching method.

A widely accepted “general purpose” teaching

method is the use of storytelling. According to Robin

(Robin, 2006), storytelling and more speciﬁcally in-

teractive digital storytelling is a powerful teaching

and learning tool for engaging both teachers and stu-

dents. Besides, storytelling can effectively be used

in many different contexts and subjects. A language

teacher can, for instance, ask his/her students to cre-

ate a non-linear narrative in order to improve their

literacy skills (Menezes, 2012), while a mathematics

teacher may aim at developing the student’s argumen-

tative competences (Albano et al., 2016). These ex-

amples show how ﬂexible is the use of storytelling in

the educational context.

The present work exploits the ﬂexibility of the sto-

rytelling to promote computational thinking and pro-

gramming skills in the existing scholar curriculum.

This is done with the support of a new tool, named

piBook (Programmable Interactive Book), which the

current paper means to introduce.

The paper is structured in ﬁve sections. The cur-

rent one exposes the motivation and goals of the work.

The second section presents correlated strategies used

to create digital non-linear narratives. The follow-

ing one provides the piBook goals and main require-

ments. The next one details the piBook system, by

presenting its architectural elements and how pro-

grams are created on it. Finally, the last section pro-

vides some considerations about the developed tool as

well as intended future work.

2 RELATED WORK

Some computational tools have already been created

with the purpose of enabling users to create digital

interactive stories as well as to publish their books.

Most of these tools use narrative ﬂows (i.e., directed

graphs) in order to deﬁne the non-linear structure of

the story. However, some non trivial interactions are

particularly difﬁcult to accomplish without the use of

programming resources and concepts (such as vari-

ables, conditionals, loops). While some tools deal

with this problem through a purely visual approach,

others allow authors to create a more complex logic

by directly using programming languages.

An example of the ﬁrst case is the StoryTec (Gobel

et al., 2008). StoryTec is storytelling platform com-

posed of two major components: an authoring envi-

ronment and a runtime engine. The authoring com-

ponent is based on a pluggable framework where dif-

ferent editors may be used to create elements for a

story. It was initially conceived with ﬁve components:

a Story Editor, a Stage Editor, an Action Set Editor, a

Property Editor, and an Asset Manager. The editors

directly related to the current work are the Story and

Action Set editors. While the ﬁrst one provides an

interactive 2D representation of the story graph, con-

taining the scenes, the transitions between the scenes

and the story elements, the second one is used to

conﬁgure the story logic inside each scene, which

is made through a visual programming environment.

The scene logic is then described visually by a set of

rules composed of conditions and actions. The pro-

gramming approach of this editor is similar to a ﬂow

diagram, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Example of programming rules in the StoryTec’s

Action Set Editor.

The StoryTec’s visual approach eases the use of

the authoring tool for non-specialists due to the fact

that no programming skills are required to deﬁne the

story logic. Nevertheless, it restraints the ability to

create rules for complex scenarios. A more recent sto-

rytelling authoring tool, named Twine (Hahn, 2016),

tackles this gap by providing the ability to write the

story logic embedded in the narrative by using a tex-

tual programming language. The way in which Twine

creates non-linear structures in the story is based on

wiki systems. The user creates a text, which may have

one or more wiki link to other texts, which may also

connect to other ones, and so forth. For increasing us-

ability, Twine provides a visualization tool where the

user can see the overall story graph, in a way similar

to StoryTec. However, differently from the latter, it

does not provide a visual editor for authoring the story

logic. In Twine, each wiki-text may also have embed-

ded a chunk of code (written in Javascript) in order

to control, for instance, how many times the user has

passed by that text or if a part of the text should be

visible or not. This approach allows more control.

However, it requires previous knowledge of a speciﬁc

programming language. Figure 2 illustrates the Twine

approach to embed variables and coding instructions

into a narrative text.

An Interactive Book Authoring Tool to Introduce Programming Logic in Schools

141

Figure 2: Example of logic embedded in the narrative in

Twine.

The two previously mentioned approaches, exem-

pliﬁed by StoryTec and Twine, have advantages and

pitfalls. While a purely visual method does not pro-

vide all programming mechanisms, a direct use of a

programming language may pose a barrier to begin-

ners. It is worth then note that each approach targets a

particular audience: non-programmer users and pro-

grammer ones. By focusing on a unique audience,

they do not provide enough mechanisms to guide a

non programmer user to become a programmer one.

In other words, they are not adequate to be used as a

learning tool.

Aiming at this learning guidance in programming

skills, several tools have been constructed using a

block-based visual programming strategy, as the one

present in Scratch (Resnick et al., 2009). Indeed,

the interest in block-based visual programming has

grown in recent years, specially in the educational

context, helping beginners to get involved in their pro-

gramming ﬁrst steps (Fraser, 2015). From a leaner

perspective, the advantages of using block-based pro-

gramming relies on the ability to use a visual language

modeled for a speciﬁc domain, the possibility of grad-

ually presenting parts of that language, and, ﬁnally,

the capacity of not allowing syntax errors (only se-

mantic errors) (Fraser, 2015).

Because of the previously mentioned reasons, au-

thoring applications using block-based programming,

such as Scratch (Resnick et al., 2009) and AppIven-

tor (Wolber, 2011), have been widely used by edu-

cators to teach programming. However, concerning

to the current work, although it is possible to create

non-linear interactive stories with Scratch, AppInven-

tor and similar applications, their visual languages do

not target the speciﬁc purpose of creating non-linear

interactive narratives. In fact, they can be categorized

as general-purpose authoring tools. A tool targeting

this particular application context may facilitate the

authoring process, while helping teaching program-

ming logic.

The present work correlates the three previously

mentioned approaches in a unique learning platform.

It provides a tool where the user can visually author a

non-linear sequence through a graph-based ﬂow, but

he can also program the story logic by using a block-

based strategy or, when he becomes more proﬁcient,

a textual programming language.

3 GOALS AND REQUIREMENTS

The primary pedagogical goal of the current work

is to stimulate the development of computational

problem-solving skills in the educational context by

the challenge of authoring digital interactive story-

telling. This goal has however a natural barrier:

school teachers usually do not have previous back-

ground on computational thinking nor programming

skills to set up a logic behind their non-linear nar-

ratives. Taking into account that barrier, it is im-

perative to target different types of audience, from

novice to expert users. So, the tool should be easy

to use by newcomers in programming (programming

skills should not be required), but also to be expres-

sive enough to programming experts. Besides that,

as it is intended to be used in an educational context,

it should also provide a smooth transition from the

novice to the advanced one.

From the novice perspective, users should be able

to conceive their non-linear narratives visually by cre-

ating states in a graph-based ﬂow-oriented diagram.

Each graph node is considered as state in the story,

which can only go forward or backward according

to the reader’s choice. For the intermediary users,

they should be able to express more complex mech-

anisms by visually dragging and dropping program-

ming blocks (Fraser, 2015). The latter introduces pro-

gramming concepts useful for handling more com-

plex reader interactions. Finally, as the intermediary

users become more proﬁcient in the concepts of pro-

gramming blocks, they may turn into advanced users

and change their programming environment to a tex-

tual programming language. The latter should pro-

vide the possibility to fully customize the reader in-

teractive experience.

Besides the aforementioned goal, the following

requirements were also established in order to set up

a playful educational environment around the tool:

• Ability to collaboratively create the story con-

tents, including the programs controlling the logic

behind the story interactions;

• Ability to share the created story with other users

(e.g. classmates and parents) and get feedback

from them;

CSEDU 2017 - 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

142

Figure 3: piBook screenshot showing a ﬂow-based programming mode and a preview of the interactive book.

• Ability to publish a ﬁnal version of the story (in-

teractive digital book).

These items resume the scope of piBook. Never-

theless, it is worth to highlight that piBook has not

been designed to be a self-guided learning tool. A

self-guided or a self-discovery learning tool must fol-

low a learning method and, for the moment, there is

no particular methodological approach set up to pi-

Book. Therefore, researchers and educators may ex-

plore the pedagogical possibilities (online and ofﬂine)

and students are supposed to be oriented by them to

use piBook as a way to put their skills and knowledge

in practice.

4 piBook

piBook is an online application composed of two

parts: an authoring platform and a running applica-

tion. The ﬁrst one is a web-based system where users,

students or teachers, may create interactive books for

their audience, the readers. The second part is a

mobile-based application able to load an interactive

book description and execute it. Figure 3 shows a

screenshot of the authoring platform in ﬂow-based

programming mode. The ﬁgure also presents a pre-

view panel where the user can check his creation be-

fore publishing.

For convenience, we refer hereafter piBook au-

thoring plataform as piBook tool and the books au-

thored by the application just as piBooks.

4.1 Elements

In order to understand how to author a piBook, it is

important to have an overview of the elements com-

posing the tool and the authored books. A piBook is

structured into four main elements, which are:

• Section: sections provide a way to organize the

book, either to give sequence of a narrative, like

chapters, or to give a feedback of evolution in the

activities, like game levels. A user/reader may, for

instance, stay in a section (level) while some goal

has not been accomplished. As soon as the reader

reaches the section (level) goals, another one can

be shown.

• Formatted texts: these refer to the visual contents

of the application, which are formatted texts op-

tionally embedded with images, videos, math for-

mulas, and references to data stored in spread-

sheets or program variables. Formatted texts are

then visual templates, which are used to interact

with readers.

• Spreadsheets: piBooks may use persistent data

to fulﬁll the book’s templates (formatted texts)

or to save data from reader interactions. Spread-

sheets are where these data are saved. The reason

for using spreadsheets instead of database mod-

els is to ease the edition and generation of reports.

Since book authors may not be programmer ex-

perts, they may beneﬁt from using a common and

well-known interface element as a spreadsheets.

• Programs: they deﬁne the logic of the interactive

An Interactive Book Authoring Tool to Introduce Programming Logic in Schools

143

book, choosing the template to show to readers,

fulﬁlling it with corresponding data, and deciding

what to save in the spreadsheet after a reader in-

teraction. It is the kernel of a piBook.

Theses elements are illustrated in Figure 4. The

numbers in the ﬁgure represent the cardinality of the

relations between elements. A piBook is composed

of one or more sections, formatted texts and optional

spreadsheets. Each section should have an associated

program, from which the formatted texts and spread-

sheets are handled.

Figure 4: piBook elements.

The ﬁgure also highlights the correlation between

the spreadsheets, formatted texts and programs with

the architectural pattern known as MVC (Model-

View-Controller). This pattern creates a separation

of concerns by assigning responsibilities to different

elements. While the formatted texts form the com-

munication channel with the reader (the view), the

spreadsheets store useful book data (the model), and

the program controls the logic behind the scenes (the

controller).

Although the usage of the tool was primarily tar-

geted to create narrative stories for an educational au-

dience, it was perceived during its development that

several other applications could be also constructed

through the use of its concepts and resources. Possi-

ble uses involve the creation of different kinds of in-

teractive activities, such as games, quizzes, tutorials

and chatbots. Figure 5 illustrates some of these uses.

Figure 5: Examples of pi-Book applications targeted on mo-

bile devices.

4.2 Programming Modes

As the primary idea behind the tool is to promote

computational thinking and programming, a piBook

author is not supposed to have previous knowledge

about computer programming. It is then necessary to

build a smooth learning curve. Our approach to intro-

duce computer programming relies on three levels of

ability.

The ﬁrst one was conceived to the users who have

never programmed computers using a formal com-

puter language. In this level, a piBook logic is deﬁned

visually by a ﬂow-oriented state-based diagram. The

logic is then composed of several states, each one re-

lated to a speciﬁc formatted text. When the book is in

a state, the corresponding formatted text is presented

to the reader. After the presentation, the book may go

to a new state, including a user interaction state, like

an option request. When the user chooses, the book

CSEDU 2017 - 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

144

switches to a new state, and so on. Figure 6 illustrates

an example of ﬂow-based program. Starting in state

T1, the formatted text associated to T1 is presented

to the reader. After that, the book goes to state T2

and its corresponding text is also presented. Then, a

reader interaction is requested, asking to choose an

option through state O3. According to the answer, the

book goes to state T4 or T5. After T4, a new user in-

teraction is requested and the book state can switches

back to state T1 or T2.

Figure 6: Flow-based program.

As previously mentioned, this level of logic pro-

gramming is well-suited for beginners, since the vi-

sual approach facilitates the conception of non-linear

stories even for non programmers. Besides that, the

book author can have a glimpse on the overall book

and when its content ﬂow changes. However, this ap-

proach is also limiting. It restrains the use of more la-

bored interactions. Consider, for instance, the book’s

author wants to get the reader’s name in order to pro-

vided personalized feedback during the reading. It

will not be possible with the ﬂow-based approach. For

this, it is necessary to deal with the concept of vari-

able, which will temporarily store the reader’s name.

The second programming level tackles this limi-

tation. It was conceived to the users who want more

expressiveness in their books, but have not enough ex-

perience with computer programs yet. In this level, a

piBook logic is also deﬁned visually, but with a block-

based domain speciﬁc language (DSL).

As one of the designed goals of piBook tool is

to provide a smooth learning path between user pro-

gramming expertise, a program written in a ﬂow-

based way should be able to be translated to the block-

based mode. Therefore, the state transitions of ﬂow-

based programs should also be present in a block-

based solution.

Flow-based programs are Finite State Machines

(FSM). As so, it naturally handles state transitions. To

provide the corresponding mechanism of state transi-

tions in block-based programs, an event-based strat-

egy was chosen. This approach takes into account the

events triggered by actions performed by readers in a

particular state. As soon as an event is triggered, a

new state transition occurs and piBook enters another

narrative state.

Following this approach, if the user who created

the ﬂow-based program shown in Figure 6 wants to

start working with block-based program, he can trans-

late his original ﬂow-based code to a block-based one.

Figure 7 illustrates an extract of the block-based code

resulting from this transition. In the ﬁgure, T1, T2 and

Q1 represent the corresponding states and the reader

interaction state 1 in Figure 6.

Figure 7: Extract of a block-based program.

After that transition, the user can improve his

block-based code by using programming resources

such as variables, conditionals and loops. At this

point, the user can, for instance, iterate over a pre-

viously saved spreadsheet data in order to check a

reader answer.

Finally, the third level enables the book authors to

conceive more complex interactions with the reader.

In this level, piBook logic is deﬁned as a textual gen-

eral purpose programming language. The current sup-

ported language is Javascript, but other scripting lan-

guages may be incorporated depending on the needs

of the future piBook users.

To facilitate the translations between program-

ming modes, the textual mode also follows the event-

based strategy incorporated in the block-based mode.

Again, if the user who created the ﬂow-based program

shown in Figure 6 wants to start working with textual-

based program, he can translate his original code to

a general purpose programming language as the one

presented in Figure 8. The states T1, T2, T3, T4, Q1

and Q2 represent the same states and the reader inter-

action states as described in the block-based mode.

An Interactive Book Authoring Tool to Introduce Programming Logic in Schools

145

01. book.write(T1);

02.

03. T1.on(’read’, ()=> book.write(T2));

04. T2.on(’read’, ()=> book.ask(O3));

05. T4.on(’read’, ()=> book.ask(O6));

06. T5.on(’read’, ()=> book.end());

07.

08. O3.on(’answered’, (answer) => {

09. if (answer == 1)

10. book.write(T4);

11. else

12. book.write(T5);

13. });

14.

15. O6.on(’answered’, (answer) => {

16. if (answer == 1)

17. book.write(T1);

18. else

19. book.write(T2);

20. });

Figure 8: Code example based on event transitions (in

Javascript).

These three programming levels are assumed to

handle the different levels of knowledge of the tar-

geted audience, from a beginner student to an expe-

rienced one. However, it is worth to note that, due

to expressiveness capacity of each mode (or its limi-

tations), the tool allows a code to be translated from

a less expressive mode to a more expressive one, but

not otherwise. In other words, if the user starts a sec-

tion using a ﬂow-based program, he can transform it

into block or textual-based code. However, after that,

he cannot revert a block or text-based code back to a

ﬂow-based program. The same is valid between block

and textual code.

4.3 System Architecture and Data

Format

As previously mentioned, from the user perspective,

piBook is an online application composed of two

parts: an web-based authoring tool (book creator) and

a mobile application (book reader). There is however

a third component, a web server, to handle persis-

tent data and to provide visible online data (published

books). The server exposes a JSON-based REST API

used by both the authoring tool and the mobile appli-

cation to create, read, update or destroy book proper-

ties, sections, contents or logic speciﬁcations.

The authoring tool is a Single Page Application

(SPA) composed of three main components: 1) a

user dashboard, where the user can edit his authored

books, create new ones and publish them; 2) a book

editor, where the user can edit the book sections, their

contents and logic; and 3) a data editor, represented

by a spreadsheet where the user can collect data from

book interactions and/or serve static data for his book.

The authoring tool, as well as the mobile applica-

tion, consume data from the server in a speciﬁc for-

mat. The data format exchanged by server and ap-

plications induce the hierarchical structures of a pi-

Book into sections, and the latter into a collection of

text snippets and a section logic. The snippet con-

tents follow the Delta format to describe Rich Text

Documents (RTD) speciﬁed by the Quill editor (Quill,

2017).

Figures 9 and 10 illustrate how a book speciﬁed in

the ﬂow-based mode is represented by the speciﬁed

data format. Such format represents the book’s con-

tents in a static way. The data is then interpreted by

the mobile reader to dynamically construct the inter-

active application.

Figure 9: Example of ﬂow.

5 FINAL REMARKS AND

FUTURE WORK

The current paper introduced a tool, named piBook,

conceived to help the introduction of programming

logic in schools. The paper describes the ideas of the

tool, how it is structured and the reasons behind the

choices. The choice of focusing on storytelling was

mainly due to the ﬂexibility it provides, enabling the

introduction of programming logic in most of the sub-

jects of a scholar curriculum, from history to sciences.

The tool is not production-ready. For the time be-

ing, it is possible to specify interactive narratives in

the ﬂow-based programming mode, by writing for-

matted texts, options requests, and deﬁning the logic

to control these contents and interactions. However,

CSEDU 2017 - 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

146

{

"title": "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland",

"authors": [ "lewiscarroll" ],

"sections": [{

"title": "Down the Rabbit-Hole",

"snippets": [{

"type": "text",

"label": "Start",

"content": [

{ "insert": "Alice was beginning...\n" },

{ "insert": { "image": "rabbit.png" } }

]

{ "type": "options",

"label": "O1",

"content": [

{ "insert": "What should Alice do?\n",

"attributes": { "header": 2 } },

{ "insert": "Enter in the rabbit-hole\n",

"attributes": { "list": "bullet" } },

{ "insert": "Try to wake up",

"attributes": { "list": "bullet" } }

"options": {

"o1": "Enter in the rabbit-hole",

"o2": "Try to wake up"

}

{ "type": "text",

"label": "inTheHole",

"content": [

{ "insert": "Alice entered...\n" }

]

{ "type": "text",

"label": "theEnd",

"content": [

{ "insert": "and Alice woke up.\n" },

{ "insert": "The End",

"attributes": { "header": 1 } }

]

}],

"logic": {

"flow": {

"transitions": [

{ "from": "start", "to": "O1" },

{ "from": "O1", "option": "o1",

"to": "inTheHole" },

{ "from": "O1", "option": "o2",

"to": "theEnd" }

]

}

}]

}

Figure 10: Example of JSON data representing the contents

of the book speciﬁed in Figure 9.

transitions to block and textual modes are still in de-

velopment. Usability tests in the ﬂow-based mode is

currently being made in order to improve user experi-

ence.

The presented tool is not been conceived to be a

self-guided learning tool. It just helps students to put

in practice previously acquired knowledge in order

to develop their coding skills. It is supposed to be

used as a supporting mechanism for different teach-

ing strategies. However, as a companion of story-

telling, piBook seems to be well suited for project-

based learning initiatives (PBL) (Krajcik and Blu-

menfeld, 2006), where students are designated to au-

thor interactive contents for a speciﬁc subject and, for

this, they must produce the logic behind the interac-

tive activity. However, an adequate methodological

approach for piBook has not been conceived yet. Us-

ability tests with school teachers should still be done

prior to applying experiments with students.

Besides the improvements and requests after the

usability tests, some pedagogical evaluations must

also be performed. An assumption is that the exis-

tence of different levels of programming modes facil-

itates project-based learning activities, since the same

project can be assigned to the whole class and each

student may chose a level according to his/her prior

individual experience in programming.

The use of a general purpose programming lan-

guage in project-based activities may also become ad-

vantageous because of the expressive amount of third

party libraries, which may help the development of

complex interactive books. In this level, the author is

supposed to be comfortable with programming and,

using the adequate third party library, may for in-

stance create books dealing with mobile devices GPS,

NFC, and so on. Authors in this level, who also want

to customize piBook appearance, may also set CSS

rules to modify colors, fonts and the general book lay-

out. These features should be implemented in next

versions of the tool as a pluggable third-part compo-

nent.

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