Interactive Storytelling for Elementary School Nature Science Education

With the impacts of global warming, water and soil conservation education becomes an important learning topic for elementary school students in Nature Science course. However, students in traditional Nature Science learning are usually passive and lack the sense of participation. To provide an effective and interesting learning activity for water and soil conservation education, the interactive storytelling game using Scratch digital multimedia editing tool is proposed. Based on the constructivism, storytelling through an animation or simple interactive game allows students actively participate the learning and engage students in the learning activity. However, learning by storytelling usually requires the teacher to assess every student's learning activities individually. It is costly and time consuming. To solve the issue, a scenario table is proposed to assist the assessment of the students' cognition and causal link in storytelling. With the design of the scenario table, students' thinking logic can be structurally logged and the teacher can then easily diagnose students' misconception and provide remedial learning. The experiment evaluation was conducted to 127 fifth grade students. The experimental results show that students have high learning satisfaction in the interactive storytelling learning activity. The results also show the improvement of students' reasoning capabilities with the assistance of scenario table and Scratch tool.