Supporting Upper Elementary Students in Multidisciplinary Block-Based Narrative Programming

Digital storytelling, which combines traditional storytelling with digital tools, has seen growing popularity as a means of creating motivating problem-solving activities in K-12 education. Though an attractive potential solution to integrating language arts skills across topic areas such as computational thinking and science, better understanding of how to structure and support these activities is needed to increase adoption by teachers. Building on prior research on block-based programming for interactive storytelling, we present initial results from a study of 28 narrative programs created by upper elementary students that were collected in both classroom and extracurricular contexts. The narrative programs are evaluated across multiple dimensions to better understand the types of narrative programs being created by the students, characteristics of the students who created the narratives, and what types of support could most benefit the students in their narrative program construction. In addition to analyzing the student-created narrative programs, we also provide recommendations for promising system-generated and instructor-led supports.