  Novice learners find motion as a continuous process of change challenging to
understand. In this paper, we present a pedagogical approach based on
agent-based, visual programming to address this issue. Integrating Logo
programming with curricular science has been shown to be challenging in
previous research on educational computing. We present a new Logo-based visual
programming language - ViMAP - and, a sequence of learning activities involving
programming and modeling, designed specifically to support seamless integration
between programming and learning kinematics. We describe relevant affordances
of the ViMAP environment that supports such seamless integration. We then
present ViMAP-MoMo, a curricular unit designed in ViMAP for modeling
kinematics, for a wide range of students (elementary - high school). The main
contribution of this paper is that we describe in detail a sequence of learning
activities in three phases, discuss the underlying rationale for each phase,
and where relevant, report results in the form of observational data from two
studies.
