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Recent years have seen growing awareness of the potential digital storytelling brings to creating engaging K-12 learning experiences. By fostering students’ interdisciplinary knowledge and skills, digital storytelling holds great promise for realizing positive impacts on student learning in language arts as well as STEM subjects. In parallel, researchers and practitioners increasingly acknowledge the importance of computational thinking in supporting K-12 students’ problem solving across subjects and grade levels, including science and elementary school. Integrating the unique affordances of digital storytelling and computational thinking offers significant potential; however, careful attention must be given to ensure students and teachers are properly supported and not overwhelmed. In this paper, we present our work on a narrative-centered learning environment that engages upper elementary students (ages 9 to 11) in computational thinking and physical science through the creation of interactive science narratives. Leveraging log data from a pilot study with 28 students using the learning environment, we analyze the narrative programs students created across multiple dimensions to better understand the nature of the resulting narratives. Furthermore, we examine automating this analysis using artificial intelligence techniques to support real-time adaptive feedback. Results indicate that the learning environment enabled students to create interactive digital stories demonstrating their understanding of physical science, computational thinking, and narrative concepts, while the automated assessment techniques showed promise for enabling real-time feedback and support.
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This content will become publicly available on July 17, 2026
Laying Foundations for Scalable Coaching for Data Storytelling: A Evidence-Centered Design Approach
As demand for data scientists has increased to inform decision-making across multiple fields of societal importance, postsecondary institutions have expanded data science course offerings. Despite such growth, educators struggle to teach students all the skills central to data science. They focus on programming and statistical tools and lack time for mentoring students in data storytelling. This working paper reviewed literature and interviewed experts to model the domain knowledge of data storytelling to inform the design of intelligent technology to support data storytelling instruction at scale. The paper closes with a recommendation of two ways that artificial intelligence tools can support the development of students’ data storytelling knowledge and skills: "direct" feedback to students on routine data science tasks and "facilitated" summaries of students' data story progress to inform instructors' feedback. We intend to apply these insights to the design of intelligent coaching in an online platform to support the development of storytelling competency at scale.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2302795
- PAR ID:
- 10616437
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400712913
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 227 to 231
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- data storytelling, AI technology, evidence‐centered design
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Palermo Italy
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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