The digital short stories engineering (D2SE) framework in creating stories on computational thinking theme for children aged 3-4 years
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37134/jictie.vol9.1.13.2022Keywords:
Digital Short Stories Engineering (D2SE) framework, story structure design, computational thinking, young childrenAbstract
This paper presents a framework that can be used to guide digital short stories development that focuses on computational thinking theme suitable for young children, aged between 3-4 years old. Stories can be used to convey information and send messages to their listeners, or readers. Digital short stories are very commonly used for children’s learning. However, to effectively send the right messages, any stories including digital stories will require story engineering that helps produce a thoughtful story structure design. Meanwhile, computational thinking is considered as a valuable ability to reasoning and problem-solving. With consideration of nurturing computational thinking among the young listeners or readers, the structure design of a story can be engineered to fulfil the objective, and later it can be reused to create new and different stories with similar objectives. Thus, in this study, the Digital Short Stories Engineering (D2SE) framework was derived, and a checklist to support the framework was developed and tested using expert review. Only four experts were involved to validate the items which must be deemed suitable for young children, from several perspectives including linguistic, content and storyline, visualization, and computational thinking aspects. Several examples of digital stories that were derived based on the framework were sent to another three experts who evaluated the stories using the checklist. The results showed that all of the aspects in the framework have been successfully implemented. In conclusion, the framework can be used not only to guide story creators in creating suitable stories for young children in general but also can be used to assist people in engineering stories that can expose children to computational thinking at young ages. In addition, the framework may also be used by nursery teachers or parents when choosing suitable reading materials for their children.
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