As visual programming languages become both more expressive and more popular in the domains of real-time and embedded software, the need for rigorous techniques for reasoning about programs written in these languages becomes more pressing. Indeed, due to a subtle but fundamental mismatch between graphical and textual representations of programs, semantic concepts established in the textual setting cannot be mapped to the graphical setting without a careful analysis of the connection between the two representations. Focusing on operational (as opposed to type-theoretic) aspects of Resource-aware Programming (RAP), we analyze the connection between graphical and textual representations of programs that can express both higher-order functions and staging constructs. After establishing a precise connection between the two, we illustrate how this connection can be used to lift a reduction semantics from the textual to the graphical setting.