History education done different: A collaborative interactive digital storytelling approach for remote learners

Social interaction has been recognized as positively affecting learning, with dialogue–as a common form of social interaction–comprising an integral part of collaborative learning. Interactive storytelling is defined as a branching narrative in which users can experience different story lines with alternative endings, depending on the choices they make at various decision points of the story plot. In this research, we aim to harness the power of dialogic practices by incorporating dialogic activities in the decision points of interactive digital storytelling experiences set in a history education context. Our objective is to explore interactive storytelling as a collaborative learning experience for remote learners, as well as its effect on promoting historical empathy. As a preliminary validation of this concept, we recorded the perspective of 14 educators, who supported the value of the specific conceptual design. Then, we recruited 15 adolescents who participated in our main study in 6 groups. They were called to experience collaboratively an interactive storytelling experience set in the Athens Ancient Agora (Market) wherein we used the story decision/branching points as incentives for dialogue. Our results suggest that this experience design can indeed support small groups of remote users, in-line with special circumstances like those of the COVID-19 pandemic, and confirm the efficacy of the approach to establish engagement and promote affect and reflection on historical content. Our contribution thus lies in proposing and validating the application of interactive digital storytelling as a dialogue-based collaborative learning experience for the education of history.