Combining Movement and Imagination With Story Development: Using Direct Embodiment to Construct Narrative-Driven Computational Artifacts

• In Event: Roundtable Session 123
  In Roundtable Session: Grounded Embodied Cognition in the K-12 Classroom: Innovations and Explorations in Practice

Abstract

Overview
Acting out stories and plays provides a unique perspective for exploring and embodying complex ideas and interactions in narrative structures (Noice & Noice, 2008; Kirsch, 2009, 2011). Typically, stories are integrated into the middle school language arts curriculum through writing and reading stories, but the intersection of narrative structure, recitation, and play is rarely examined in the traditional classroom setting. The study outlined herein examines the use of Instructional Embodiment (Fadjo et al., 2010) to build, embody, and employ computational constructs to define narrative-driven computational artifacts. The objective of this study is to evaluate how Direct Embodiment (Fadjo & Black, 2011), a physical form of Instructional Embodiment, influences narrative development and character interactivity as implemented in a computational artifact.

Theoretical Framework
Previous work on Direct Embodiment focused on the effect physical embodiment has on middle- and high-school students’ ability to implement coordinate values for Sprites movement in computational artifacts (Fadjo & Black, 2011), and for actively debugging and troubleshooting complex instructions for programming robots (Petrick et al., 2011). By constructing artifacts the subject demonstrates knowledge and understanding of various key concepts necessary for the development of computational artifacts (Holbert & Wilensky, 2011; Kafai, 1995; Harel & Papert, 1991). By combining instruction on narrative-driven plot development with Direct Embodiment, we examined how students’ physical embodiment of dialogic structures influenced the construction of an individual computational artifact.

Methods and Data Sources
The study was conducted in May and June of 2011 during a daily computer technology course at a suburban public middle school. Forty-two sixth- and seventh-grade students created two projects in Scratch over a six-week period. All students, for the first three weeks, students either created a puzzle adventure video game (PAVG; n=34) or an interactive graphic novel (IGN; n=13) as part of the Code Literacy Curriculum (Fadjo et al., 2010). For the second project, students created their own individual projects based on a semi-structured storyboard template and concepts covered during the development of the first project.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
Data for the study includes the storyboards and computational artifacts from the second project, reflection notes, and pre- and post-survey results. Analyses focused on the complexity of narrative structure (as represented both within the storyboards and the computational artifacts), a cognitive task analysis of factual and functional relationship information present in the reflections, and the level of interactivity between characters within the individual computational artifact.

Results
We found the combination of narrative-driven Code Literacy instruction (IGN) with Direct Embodiment of pre-defined Scratch scripts resulted in projects that utilized more dialogic structures. The students who received Code Literacy instruction on the goal-driven project (PAVG) implemented fewer dialogic structures, but incorporated more computational thinking concepts to create more computationally complex artifacts.

Scientific significance of work
This research supports the line of inquiry examining embodied instruction within the language arts classroom, and establishes a foundation for additional research on the types of narratives, including complex inter-relationships between two actors (characters), that can be embodied in a formal instructional setting.

Authors

• Cameron L. Fadjo, Teachers College, Columbia University

• John B. Black, Teachers College, Columbia University