Story Templates - Serious Storytelling to Support Learning

Abstract

School students are increasingly distracted by modern technology, leading to decreasing skills in reading and writing. This paper presents the E-learning-tool "Story Templates", which enables teachers to include stories into the daily homework assignments. The basic idea is to insert learning content meaningful into exciting stories, coming from a large database of stories. Each story has its predefined breaks, where different templates or rather tasks can be inserted, for example an arithmetic problem. Teachers can choose between various ways of grading the homework results, including multiple choice, text based etc. The tool also contains an app that students can use on their smartphones or tablets to read the stories and provide answers. The goal of this work is to make learning more fun again, by using modern technology.