Do Storytelling Videos Help Students Learn Abstract Concepts?

While storytelling has been adopted in other science disciplines to support diversity and improve learning outcomes, it has not been broadly explored in computing. To begin to bridge this gap, we investigated whether storytelling videos help students better understand abstract concepts when they are first introduced and whether this effect supports transfer of knowledge to another context. This experiment was deployed at a North American research-intensive university, with 138 students assigned in the storytelling condition and another 138 assigned to the traditional format. In storytelling videos, physical analogues were used to represent computing ideas, and animated characters were voiced to introduce worst, best, and average-case analysis. In the traditional videos, the same concepts were presented using an instructional monologue over a slide presentation. Our results suggest that students who watched the storytelling videos performed better than those watched the traditional videos in their first attempt on the pre-lecture quiz. However, this effect did not transfer to a second context.