A pilot study of interactive storytelling for bullying prevention education

Abstract

The bullying prevention education aims to teach students the management of cognition and emotion conflicts. To prevent bullying, the awareness and adult involvement are two key prerequisites. However, the awareness of bullies and victims is the challenging and important issue. In this paper, the Interactive Storytelling is proposed to provide assessment for bullies and victims. Storytelling is usually used in the teaching to motivate students to realize the abstract concepts through the stories. The storytelling is a good approach to situate students in specific scenario for easily providing the assessment and guidance for students to resolve the conflicts. To record the students' storytelling process, the Scratch multimedia editing tool is used as platform to support the storytelling by making animation. To support the assessment, the story template is proposed using knowledge acquisition approach. Firstly, the students are situated in the predefined story background. Next, students can choose one action from several predefined story branches and perform the main character by typing the script and voice recording. Through the acting of roles as bullies or victims, the teacher can realize the students' thinking while in the cognition and emotion conflicts situations. In the experiment, 63 junior high school students were participated in the pilot study. The students were engaged in the digital storytelling and were willing to express their thinking and the digital storytelling can effectively support the awareness the bullying. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.