Having Students See the Human Context of Their Work through Narrative

Abstract

In teaching an introductory course whose content was part computer literacy and part digital logic, an innovative approach to getting students to be engaged with the material was attempted. All homework assignments were part of a large narrative story with a protagonist that has many adventures, and during his adventures, he must ask for help from his friend. The friend is, of course, the student doing the homework. This provides a context and targeted audience for the students' writing, makes the student feel like their work is part of a larger coherent whole, situates the specific skills necessary in doing the homework, and results in the students directing their dislike of the assignment at the protagonist of the story rather than at the instructor. In doing this, students develop writing skills (as they write answers to questions from the story's protagonist) which are different in nature than what they would in an assignment in which they were asked to "show your work"; these writing skills more closely approximate the communication skills that these technical students would need to communicate with a non-technical audience. Integrating the large narrative story within the context of popular culture references, previous and future assignments, and allowing for it to build up suspense and tension with regard to the coming assignments and topics provides a continuity of instructional flow which is advantageous to retaining students' interest. This integration also helps with the education of various other non-technical skills as students learn to see their work in the larger human context of what they are doing through the use of the continually running narrative which holds the course together. In this paper I will describe this approach in detail, provide examples of how this approach was used, and provide survey results from students regarding the effectiveness of the approach in accomplishing the aforementioned items.