  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.
