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1. Using narratives to evoke empathy in museum-based engineering activities

   Bennett, Dorothy; Letourneau, Susan M.; McMillan Culp, Katherine; Liu, James; Argudo, Yessenia (April 2019, American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting)

   In this design-based research project, researchers and activity developers across four institutions are investigating how narratives can evoke empathy and influence girls’ participation and engagement in museum-based engineering design activities. The project involves the development and testing of six pairs of engineering activities. Through iterative development of these activity pairs, we have refined a conceptual model defining how engineering activities can incorporate a variety of narrative elements to support empathy and engagement. In addition, each pair includes one version of the activity with narrative elements, and one without — for example, children design a vehicle that can move over different textured surfaces (non-narrative) or that can help someone travel around the world across different landscapes (narrative), allowing us to examine how narrative elements influence girls’ ideation and persistence in iterating their designs. We analyzed the number of children who participated in each version of the activities, average hold times, and detailed observations and follow-up interviews with girls between ages 7-14 who tried the activities with their families. Results showed that narrative versions invited greater participation among both girls and boys, and that different narrative elements (such as characters and settings) evoked different aspects of empathy (such as affective responses and cognitive perspective-taking). We discuss the implications of the results for the design and facilitation of inclusive engineering design experiences in informal learning settings. 

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2. SceneCraft: Automating Interactive Narrative Scene Generation in Digital Games with Large Language Models

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27504  

   Kumaran, Vikram; Rowe, Jonathan; Mott, Bradford; Lester, James (October 2023, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment)

   Creating engaging interactive story-based experiences dynamically responding to individual player choices poses significant challenges for narrative-centered games. Recent advances in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have the potential to revolutionize procedural content generation for narrative-centered games. Historically, interactive narrative generation has specified pivotal events in the storyline, often utilizing planning-based approaches toward achieving narrative coherence and maintaining the story arc. However, manual authorship is typically used to create detail and variety in non-player character (NPC) interaction to specify and instantiate plot events. This paper proposes SCENECRAFT, a narrative scene generation framework that automates NPC interaction crucial to unfolding plot events. SCENECRAFT interprets natural language instructions about scene objectives, NPC traits, location, and narrative variations. It then employs large language models to generate game scenes aligned with authorial intent. It generates branching conversation paths that adapt to player choices while adhering to the author’s interaction goals. LLMs generate interaction scripts, semantically extract character emotions and gestures to align with the script, and convert dialogues into a game scripting language. The generated script can then be played utilizing an existing narrative-centered game framework. Through empirical evaluation using automated and human assessments, we demonstrate SCENECRAFT’s effectiveness in creating narrative experiences based on creativity, adaptability, and alignment with intended author instructions. 

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3. Engaging youth in biodiversity education through visual narrative

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14386  

   Ricci, Kyra; Lu, Kathleen; Shidemantle, Grascen; Hua, Jessica (November 2024, Conservation Biology)

   Abstract Engaging youth in early and sustained conservation education has important implications for promoting positive attitudes and behaviors in those who will become the future of conservation and management. Toward this goal, visual narratives (comic books, graphic novels) are an increasingly popular method used by conservation scientists to educate young people due to their approachable use of art and narrative storytelling. However, no studies have directly assessed how visual narratives compare with more traditional forms of conservation education for youth. We asked, how does education about biodiversity through visual narrative affect student perceptions and knowledge of science content relative to a traditional resource, and is there a novelty effect when using visual narrative versus traditional resources? To assess our questions, we utilized a semistructured approach to develop a biodiversity education program. Specifically, we developed an original graphic novel (visual narrative treatment) and a slideshow presentation (traditional treatment) with the same content to educate children about wetland biodiversity. We recruited, trained, and randomized 26 third‐grade teachers to deliver either the visual narrative or traditional resource in their classrooms. Students completed pretest, posttest, and follow‐up surveys assessing their perceptions of science and knowledge of the lesson content. Students in the visual narrative treatment held more positive perceptions of science (by 3.79%,p = 0.001), whereas students in the traditional treatment performed better on content quizzes (by 7.97%,p = 0.002). We found evidence for a novelty bias when using the visual narrative but not the traditional resource. These findings point to the importance of understanding the target audience and clearly defining educational goals. Overall, our results contribute to broader understanding of the relative benefits and limitations of conservation education through nontraditional means and of practices for successfully delivering effective, accessible, and rewarding conservation education to educators and youth. 

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4. Educational Game Design: An Empirical Study of the Effects of Narrative

   Jemmali, C.; Bunian, S.; Mambretti, A.; Seif El-Nasr, M. (August 2018, Foundations of Digital Games)

   Integrating narrative elements into a game is a key element in de- signing an immersive experience. Narrative has been hypothesized to improve engagement, motivation, and learning within educational environments. While empirical results have been produced to show that narrative enhances engagement and motivation, its effects on learning were shown to either be insignificant or negative. We, there- fore, aim to address the question of how to integrate narrative in a game to improve learning. We address this through the design of May’s Journey, an educational game that teaches basic programming concepts where a story is integrated. The game design seamlessly integrates learning goals, core mechanic and narrative elements. In this paper, we discuss the game design as well as a study we con- ducted to compare two game versions, one with rich narrative and the other with light narrative. Results demonstrate that participants who interacted with the rich narrative version had fewer program- ming errors and increased engagement within the game. We present our contributions in the form of educational design principles for narrative integration supported by our study and results. 

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5. Design guidelines for narrative maps in sensemaking tasks

   https://doi.org/10.1177/14738716221079593  

   Keith Norambuena, Brian Felipe; Mitra, Tanushree; North, Chris (July 2022, Information Visualization)

   Narrative sensemaking is a fundamental process to understand sequential information. Narrative maps are a visual representation framework that can aid analysts in their narrative sensemaking process. Narrative maps allow analysts to understand the big picture of a narrative, uncover new relationships between events, and model the connection between storylines. We seek to understand how analysts create and use narrative maps in order to obtain design guidelines for an interactive visualization tool for narrative maps that can aid analysts in narrative sensemaking. We perform two experiments with a data set of news articles. The insights extracted from our studies can be used to design narrative maps, extraction algorithms, and visual analytics tools to support the narrative sensemaking process. The contributions of this paper are three-fold: (1) an analysis of how analysts construct narrative maps; (2) a user evaluation of specific narrative map features; and (3) design guidelines for narrative maps. Our findings suggest ways for designing narrative maps and extraction algorithms, as well as providing insights toward useful interactions. We discuss these insights and design guidelines and reflect on the potential challenges involved. As key highlights, we find that narrative maps should avoid redundant connections that can be inferred by using the transitive property of event connections, reducing the overall complexity of the map. Moreover, narrative maps should use multiple types of cognitive connections between events such as topical and causal connections, as this emulates the strategies that analysts use in the narrative sensemaking process. 

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