On the Use of Storytelling in a Databases Course: Developing Transversal Competencies

Descripción:

Learning processes in Computer Science programs require the development of transversal competencies that are often excluded from official curricula. The infusion of storytelling in teaching strategies can be used to approach these competencies, while supporting meaningful learning. Previous studies have shown the multifaceted role of storytelling in bridging technical knowledge, cultural context, and user engagement across diverse fields. This paper reports on our experience using storytelling in an undergraduate database course. Namely, storytelling was used to evaluate the physical organization of files and indexes. The purpose of this strategy was addressing subject-specific contents while fostering students’ creativity and communication competencies. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of our storytelling-infused teaching strategy, and provide samples of students’ learning results as well as lessons learned from the authors. An anonymous student survey was used to assess this strategy. Overall, results from the survey show that most of the students considered that the teaching strategy helped them develop their creativity and communication skills, and allowed further integration in teamwork dynamics. Indeed, students were able to clearly express these competencies through the creation and presentation of complex characters and conflicts in entertaining stories. Most students also found the strategy to be fun and enjoyable, but nevertheless stressful, due to the short time they had to create the story, while dealing with work overloads from other courses. Furthermore, some students expressed their frustration with the strategy, as they failed to see the value of nurturing creativity through storytelling in the field of computer science. As future work, we plan on experimenting with storytelling-infused teaching strategies in other computer science courses, to ascertain at what level of the computer science program these strategies may yield the best results for student learning and motivation.

Tipo de publicación: Conference Paper

Publicado en: 22nd International Conference on Smart Technologies & Education

Autores
  • Martínez, A.
  • Mena

Investigadores del CITIC asociados a la publicación
Dra. Alexandra Martínez Porras

Proyecto asociado a la publicación

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On the Use of Storytelling in a Databases Course: Developing Transversal Competencies