Engaging Children in Digital Storytelling

Storytelling is an effective educational strategy to empower narrative, creativity, critical and divergent thinking, communicative and literary skills. Storytelling relies on narrative capabilities, such as literary artifices defined by the Italian writer Gianni Rodari in his masterpiece “Grammar of Fantasy” to teach children how to create stories. While narratives and principles for empowering storytelling skills are widely explored, educators and children are rarely supported in applying these theories by technological tools. To encourage children to improve their creativity, we proposed Novelette, a digital learning environment to support Rodari-style storytelling. As engagement in education is often correlated to learning, in this article, we focus on the engagement perspective in inventing and telling stories by Novelette. We report an in-presence activity with 49 children, aged 10 years old, held in a formal setting at school. An engagement questionnaire was administered to understand whether children were engaged in telling stories by Novelette. This paper offers a descriptive statistical analysis of the questionnaire results, which are discussed to distil lessons for future engaging digital storytelling activities at school.