Digital storytelling and group work: Integrating the narrative approach into a higher education computer science course

Abstract

This study discusses the integration of digital storytelling and the narrative approach into a University level Computer Science course. The pedagogical intervention took place on a project basis. The plan involved student work in groups for the production of digital stories in three phases, including an abstract, a manuscript and a final story. The overall instructional design included workshops and lectures, online tutorials, and group work. The students were assigned to explore the topic of recursion. Face-to-face meetings for the coordination of group work were emphasized during lectures, workshops and project instructions. The study uses qualitative research methods and the findings indicate two main patterns of group work. The first pattern follows from loose coordination and division of tasks among group members at the initial stages of the project. This results in documentary-like and program-based video stories. The second pattern involves tighter collaboration with face-to-face meetings for common task completion, video recording and editing, and manuscript improvement. This mode of work results in short-film style stories where recursion is well-represented. In both patterns, however, the videos present external rather than internal examples of recursion. As a result, the digital stories represent what the code does instead of how it does it.