Exploring Individual and Collaborative Storytelling in an Introductory Creative Coding Class

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of storytelling in teaching programming to university students using text-based p5.js, providing insights and recommendations based on three assignments involving individual and collaborative work.

Contribution

It is the first to examine storytelling pedagogy with university students using text-based programming, offering practical insights and recommendations.

Findings

Students' experiences with storytelling varied between individual and collaborative tasks.

The paper provides specific recommendations to improve storytelling assignments in university programming courses.

Insights into the challenges and benefits of using storytelling in a university-level, text-based programming context.

Abstract

Teaching programming through storytelling is a popular pedagogical approach and an active area of research. However, most previous work in this area focused on K-12 students using block-based programming. Little, if any, work has examined the approach with university students using text-based programming. This experience report fills this gap. Specifically, we report our experience administering three storytelling assignments -- two individual and one collaborative -- in an introductory computer science class with 49 undergraduate students using $\textit{p5.js}$, a text-based programming library for creative coding. Our work contributes an understanding of students' experiences with the three authoring processes and a set of recommendations to improve the administration of and experience with individual and collaborative storytelling with text-based programming.