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Engaging Children in Digital Storytelling

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Methodologies and Intelligent Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning, 11th International Conference (MIS4TEL 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 326))

Abstract

Storytelling is an effective educational strategy to empower narrative, creativity, critical and divergent thinking, communicative and literary skills. Storytelling relies on narrative capabilities, such as literary artifices defined by the Italian writer Gianni Rodari in his masterpiece “Grammar of Fantasy” to teach children how to create stories. While narratives and principles for empowering storytelling skills are widely explored, educators and children are rarely supported in applying these theories by technological tools. To encourage children to improve their creativity, we proposed Novelette, a digital learning environment to support Rodari-style storytelling.

As engagement in education is often correlated to learning, in this article, we focus on the engagement perspective in inventing and telling stories by Novelette. We report an in-presence activity with 49 children, aged 10 years old, held in a formal setting at school. An engagement questionnaire was administered to understand whether children were engaged in telling stories by Novelette. This paper offers a descriptive statistical analysis of the questionnaire results, which are discussed to distil lessons for future engaging digital storytelling activities at school.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Novelette homepage: http://www.isislab.it:19984/en/home-page-2/

    Novelette source code: https://github.com/routetopa/storylet.

  2. 2.

    https://wordassociations.net/.

  3. 3.

    https://rhymebrain.com.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the school chief of the Convitto Nazionale Giordano Bruno, Rocco Gervasio; Cristina Correra, Anna Razzano, and Ippolita Visco, participating children of classes 4 A, B, C and their parents.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

    Agnese Addone, Giuseppina Palmieri & Maria Angela Pellegrino

Authors
  1. Agnese Addone
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  2. Giuseppina Palmieri
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  3. Maria Angela Pellegrino
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maria Angela Pellegrino .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Edificio Multiusos I+D+I, Sala 24.1, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

    Fernando De la Prieta

  2. Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Rosella Gennari

  3. Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy

    Marco Temperini

  4. Department of Information Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics, University of L'Aquila, L'Aquila, L'Aquila, Italy

    Tania Di Mascio

  5. Department of Life, Health and Environmental Sciences, University of L'Aquila, L'Aquila, Italy

    Pierpaolo Vittorini

  6. Physics and Informatics, KDMFI, Comenius University, Faculty of Mathematics, Bratislava, Slovakia

    Zuzana Kubincova

  7. Computer and Information Technology, University of Craiova, Craiova, Romania

    Elvira Popescu

  8. CIICESI, ESTG, Polytechnic of Porto, Felgueiras, Portugal

    Davide Rua Carneiro

  9. Department of Life, Health and Environmental Sciences, University of L'Aquila, Coppito, Italy

    Loreto Lancia

  10. Università degli Studi di Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

    Agnese Addone

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Addone, A., Palmieri, G., Pellegrino, M.A. (2022). Engaging Children in Digital Storytelling. In: De la Prieta, F., et al. Methodologies and Intelligent Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning, 11th International Conference. MIS4TEL 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 326. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86618-1_26

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