Bodygramming. Embodying the computational behaviour as a collective effort

During their education, the future industrial and interaction designers areincreasingly faced with constructing fully or partially functional physical prototypes.As physical computing involves interaction with the physical world through sensorsand actuators, combined with abstract data-memory, these pose additionaldifficulties for learning. While flowcharts have been useful for learning programming,we posit that using flowcharts alone are not expressive enough to efficiently helplearn physical computing. In this paper we present Bodygramming, to help thedesign-students understand how a programs function, from the perspective of theprogram in a physical computing device. In essence, Bodygramming means acting outthe behaviour of a program step-by-step, by following the instructions written onmagnetic flowchart cards. The acting enables the experience of how theasynchronous activities are related to the behaviour of the code, in a relatable humanpace. Bodygramming suggests an alternative way to understand basic programmingconcepts and abstractions.