DIGITAL STORYTELLING AS AN EFFECTIVE FRAMEWORK FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTATIONAL THINKING SKILLS

Computational Thinking (CT) has been internationally recognized as a way of thinking –including a set of essential thinking skills- that should be mastered by the whole literate population, through compulsory education along with reading, writing and mathematics. CT is described as a set of significant aspects such as abstraction, algorithmic problem solving, data representation and data analysis. Diverse studies have been conducted in order to find effective educational practices and frameworks to help K-12 students to develop their computational thinking skills and many proposals were formed. Despite this fact, a proposal identifying Digital Storytelling (DST) as a framework for the development of CT skills by K-12 level students has not yet been reported. This is the contribution of this paper. In fact, by analyzing secondary data based on the analysis of the literature regarding CT and DST a specific framework highlighting the relationship between the abilities of CT and the skills cultivated in DST for each stage of digital story development will be proposed. It is worth mentioning that DST has emerged as a powerful teaching and learning tool across all disciplines by providing various direct and indirect advantages for the learners. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to clarify the contribution of digital storytelling (DST) as an effective educational framework for the development of specific aspects of computational thinking at K-12 level students.