Poster: Project Based Learning Using Digital Storytelling: Educational Program for Students Before Learning Full-Scale PBL Practice

Abstract

This paper describes on the education program that we have developed for colleges of technology in Japan. The college of technology in Japan is Japan’s unique educational system that aims at high-school and college-age students. The five-year consistent education system specializing in engineering has garnered attention under the name of KOSEN from Asian nations. Thus, this paper assumes the second-grade students at our college of technology to be students who have not been introduced to PBL yet. The group activity-based PBL (Project Based Learning) process requires the ability to express one’s own ideas to others (communication skill), the ability to abstract problems and develop one’s thoughts (computational thinking skill), and the ability to move ahead with tasks in a planned manner (project management skill). Therefore, targeting these students, this study examines whether digital storytelling practice is feasible as an education program that broadens the above mentioned three skills. It is required in digital storytelling to condense one’s thoughts and present them as digital contents. We think that the affinity is strong between digital storytelling and PBL, as the processes that learners experience through digital storytelling activities are similar to learners’ experience in the processes of the PBL program that is based on our engineering design process. According to a questionnaire survey conducted after the class, our education program received positive feedback from 90% of the students who took the course.KeywordsDigital StorytellingEngineering designComputational thinking