Integrating Computational Thinking with Digital Storytelling to Enhancing Expression Ability

Abstract

Cultivating computational thinking has become an important key to the curriculum of science and technology learning area. When students use interactive media, they can no longer be just receiver, but use interactive media to self-expression. We will let students in grades 3-4 learn ScratchJr, because most students in grades 5-6 learn Scratch at Tainan city. The student use ScratchJr to create the animations, stories and games which interest them. We use creation as a motivation, and children can learn how to solve problems by creating their projects over and over. Children can cultivate their own computational thinking by this way. Digital storytelling can enhance cognitive ability, a nd make things specific and clear. This is a good way to make everyone to understand the abstract knowledge. Let students use ScratchJr to make digital storytelling on the iPad mini in order to cultivate students' computing thinking. The main goal of this thesis is to improve students' expressing ability to perspectives in the three-dimensional framework of computational thinking. Twenty-seven students in third grade participated in this study. They used ScratchJr to make digital storytelling on the iPad mini. The researcher designed a series of training curriculum. All training curriculum were taught by researcher. Students completed three projects in the basic, intermediate and advanced three-phase training curriculum. Students present and save their projects by the way of YouTube in this thesis. Teaching students to use the iPad mini for video recording, and providing students the interview questions. Arrange students to work in groups of two, use iPad mini to interviews with each other, and then record the interview process. In the end, the qualitative analysis method was used to analyze the students' projects after the three-phase training curriculum and the video of the interview. It will explore the objective of this study: Enhance students’ expression ability by the integration of computational thinking into digital storytelling teaching.