Abstract:

PBL is one of the most effective educational methods available in higher education, and a number of studies have been conducted regarding more effective, PBL-based classroom practice. Thus, this research explores introductory education programs that will enable learners to carry out PBL exercise in a smooth and more satisfactory manner in higher education.

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). We give our attention to digital storytelling as a teaching material that develops these three skills before students work on PBL exercise.

This paper reports 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.

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 con-dense one’s thoughts and present them as digital contents. We believe 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.

We discuss what kind of educational program is required for first to third-year students of colleges of technology (before entering a university) so that they will be able to engage in project-based learning (PBL) smoothly in the fourth to fifth years of college (early undergraduate years) in this study. It is considered that students should nurture communication skills for conveying their opinions to a third party before PBL, and the authors developed an exercise program including animation, and put it into practice in this paper. A questionnaire survey was conducted after the exercise class, and 60-70% of students who had attended the educational program gave positive answers. It was also found that the students’ self-evaluation of their animation works is stricter than the expectation of teachers.

Keywords:

Digital Storytelling, Engineering Design, Active Learning.