The Developer’s Journey: A Storytelling Framework for Cooperative

Learning in Software Engineering

Patrick Wolfschwenger

1 a

, Mona Emara

2 b

, Wolfgang Lumetsberger

, Thomas Hatter

Barbara Sabitzer

1 c

and Zsolt Lavicza

1 d

Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

Damanhour University, Damanhour, Egypt

smartpoint IT Consulting (Bechtle), Austria

{barbara.sabitzer, zsolt.lavicza}@jku.at

Keywords:

Continuing Professional Training and Development, Lifelong Learning, Cloud Computing Education,

Narrative-based Learning, Project-based Learning, Instructional Design.

Abstract:

An educational storytelling concept is presented, inspired by the archetypal story pattern common in ancient

myths as well as modern day adventures. Software development is a complex profession demanding constant

learning and improvement in a ﬁeld changing almost daily. Apart from learning new technologies and writing

computer code, much of a developer’s time is spent on problem-solving and debugging – that is, detecting

and correcting errors and bugs that cause a system to break or behave unexpectedly. The average developer

regularly goes through a series of transformative steps to overcome intricate problems that often appear obscure

and enigmatic at the beginning. The return with special knowledge to share with others is the ﬁnal reward

earned on the Developer’s Journey. Under the premise that a good story can change our perception and offset

the biases of our interpretation of reality, a didactic method has been designed for sharing and interpreting

experiences in a cooperative learning environment. In the context of cloud computing education, its effects on

problem-solving, motivation and perception are evaluated. We analyze transformative learning opportunities

in connection with narratives and discuss its potentials and limitations in community-based learning.

1 INTRODUCTION

Stories are inherently used to organize and make

sense of experiences and to share that understanding

with others. Through stories, we bring structure to our

memories and provide opportunity for learning from

one another. When a story catches our attention and

engages us, we are more likely to absorb its mean-

ing compared to when the same message would be

presented solely in facts and ﬁgures. Comprehending

material presented in narrative form comes easy to us

due to our deeply internalized understanding of how

stories are told (Hazel, 2008).

In didactics, storytelling is used as a tool to cre-

ate interest, provide a structure for remembering con-

tent, share information in a familiar and accessible

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5325-0511

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9277-7073

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1304-6863

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3701-5068

form and create a more personal connection between

learner and instructor. More empirical evidence about

the effectiveness of this teaching strategy and re-

sources on how to best use it for educational purposes

are still required (Landrum et al., 2019).

In this paper, we introduce the Developer’s Jour-

ney and evaluate its application in the professional

development of cloud developers. We discuss the

relationship between developers’ problem-solving

achievements and perceptions of the task ﬂow and

intrinsic motivation and draw conclusions whether

fruitful learning experiences could be created so that

transformative learning happens more regularly.

As the educational uses of cloud computing are on

the rise, it becomes increasingly important to ensure

the appropriate training and advisory for those con-

cerned, including IT employees, instructors, learners

and decision-makers (Wolfschwenger et al., 2020).

The Developer’s Journey was designed to give cloud

developers the opportunity to exchange experiences

and ideas as part of an in-company continuing educa-

Wolfschwenger, P., Emara, M., Lumetsberger, W., Hatter, T., Sabitzer, B. and Lavicza, Z.

The Developer’s Journey: A Storytelling Framework for Cooperative Learning in Software Engineering.

DOI: 10.5220/0011064300003182

In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2022) - Volume 2, pages 525-533

ISBN: 978-989-758-562-3; ISSN: 2184-5026

 2022 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reser ved

525

Figure 1: Illustration of the Developer’s Journey.

tion program. In the spirit of community-based learn-

ing, the framework offers every participant the op-

portunity to spread, discuss and reﬂect upon require-

ments, typical problems and innovative approaches

with the community in the form of a structured story

rather than informal exchanges.

At ﬁrst, background information on learning with

narratives, transformative and collaborative learning

is provided. Then, the Developer’s Journey is delin-

eated with reference to the individual phases of the

software development process. Practical application

of the concept is subsequently evaluated with quanti-

tative and qualitative methods.

2 CONTEXT

Narratives are fundamental to our everyday lives. We

all naturally use them to make meaning of our experi-

ences and construct our individual identities (Fisher,

1984). Narrative-based learning (NL) means learn-

ing through stories, whether compiled or received,

whether told or heard, whether written or read. On

the one hand, narrators are learners who move from

a cognitive understanding of a temporal sequence

linked to their own experiences and combine many

small pieces of information into a meaningful concept

over time, which creates the possibility for reﬂection

of underlying assumptions. On the other hand, re-

ceivers are learners who are drawn into an engaging

experience and make sense of the narrated concept on

a deeply human level.

By taking advantage of the inherent structure of

narratives, NL environments provide learners with

engaging worlds where they can actively participate

in motivating story-based problem-solving activities

(McQuiggan et al., 2008). NL frameworks serve as

cognitive structures, help individuals to frame and un-

derstand their perceptions of the world and offer sig-

niﬁcant potential for supporting transformative learn-

ing processes (Bruner, 1991).

For transformative cognitive change to occur, a

prior interpretation is needed to construe a new or re-

vised interpretation of the meaning of one’s experi-

ence (Mezirow, 1996). Cognitive transformation re-

quires a learning process that includes both assim-

ilation (adding new information into existing men-

tal structures) and accommodation (changing base

ideas in response to new information) (Corder et al.,

1999). In NL, not only narrators but also recipients

are actively engaged through critical reﬂection and

discourse to question assumptions, expectations and

context to achieve deeper meaning and new perspec-

tives to guide their future actions.

Given the relationship between narrative and

transformative learning, creating a NL framework for

cooperative learning in software engineering holds

much appeal. Niehaus et al. (2014) suggest that, to

better support the creation of narrative-centered tools,

creators need a ﬂexible framework to integrate, cat-

alog, select, and reuse narrative models. They spec-

ify model metadata to allow creators and practition-

ers to discover and understand models more easily.

Prior work in computing education using narratives

includes Guzdial and Tew (2006), who use an instruc-

tional design approach for motivating computing ed-

ucation. Landrum et al. (2019) give an overview of

a variety of pedagogical storytelling approaches re-

cently investigated and present suggestions and rec-

ommendations for implementing storytelling as a di-

dactic approach.

While the motivational and pedagogical beneﬁts

of NL are compelling, it is important for researchers

and educators to address how to maintain learners’

motivation and maximizing learners’ time-on-task as

well as to address any adverse effects on problem-

solving. A few studies have measured develop-

ers’ intrinsic motivation, ﬂow state, and knowledge

construction. McQuiggan et al. (2008) investigated

the effect of narrative on learning experiences and

outcomes with eighth-grade middle school students

and found motivational beneﬁts of narrative-centered

learning regarding self-efﬁcacy, presence, interest,

and perception of control. By drawing on the concept

of narrative-centered learning, Kuusinen et al. (2016)

have shown that intrinsic motivation and autotelic

CSEDU 2022 - 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

526

experiences are signiﬁcant predictors of developers’

user experiences and developers’ needs are character-

ized by efﬁciency, informativeness, intuitiveness and

ﬂexibility. Mott et al. (2006) draw our attention to a

critical need for orchestrating all of the events in the

unfolding story to support appropriate levels of learn-

ers’ motivation, ﬂow state, and constructing knowl-

edge for effective problem-solving in order to develop

competences as they progress into more demanding

academic contexts and ultimately the workforce.

Storytelling provides an opportunity to integrate

narratives in academic courses with community en-

gagement. Bareiss and Griss (2008) have proposed a

story-centered curriculum as part of a software engi-

neering program that prepares experienced develop-

ers for leadership roles in development teams. Within

this framework, students confront realistic technical

and organizational problems, including conﬂicting re-

quirements, limited resources and challenges to team

leadership. The system draws upon a learning-by-

doing approach with the goal of producing a trans-

formative experience for practicing software profes-

sionals.

In recent years, digital storytelling has achieved

enormous upswing in teaching and research. Digi-

tal storytelling is the practice of combining narrative

with digital content, including images, sound, and

video (Vivitsou, 2018). In the tertiary sector, stu-

dents reported interest for such teaching methods as

part of a curriculum (Dia-Eddine, 2021). Also, K-

12 has made positive experiences with digital story-

telling. Kim and Li (2021) examine how digital sto-

rytelling facilitated students’ reﬂection and learning

in a project-based middle school capstone program.

3 DESIGN

The Developer’s Journey is a synthesis of the vari-

ous, well-known variations of the monomyth and the

daily working life of a software developer. The con-

cept of the Developer’s Journey arose from consid-

erations of applying the Hero’s Journey as a didac-

tic method, which is a common template of stories in

narratology and comparative mythology that involves

a hero who embarks on an adventure, is victorious in

a decisive crisis, and returns home changed or trans-

formed. Hero myth pattern studies were popularized

by Joseph Campbell (2008), which sets out 17 dis-

tinct stages of a Hero’s Journey. A range of varia-

tions evolved over time, such as Leeming (1998) and

Vogler (2020), proposing adapted versions with dif-

ferent emphases. The stages are widely classiﬁed into

three acts: Departure, Initiation and Return.

Since the problem-solving process of software de-

velopers is also reﬂected in patterns of the monomyth,

an adapted version has been forged that serves as our

template of the Developer’s Journey. It was aligned

with the daily routines of cloud developers in the con-

sulting industry. Essentially, each project follows the

scheme of preparation, execution and retrospective

analogous to the three acts of the Hero’s Journey. The

structure is intended to support the organization of the

experiences to be shared along with the purposeful in-

troduction of content and complexity.

For the construction of the Developer’s Journey,

we have built on the work of Avraamidou and Os-

borne (2009), who explored the potential of narra-

tive in science education and identiﬁed the seven nec-

essary components of a narrative based on a meta-

analysis:

• Purpose – Helps us understand the natural world

• Events – Contains a sequence of events connected

to each other and involving a uniﬁed subject

• Structure – Has an identiﬁable structure around

the sequence of events (beginning, middle, end)

• Time – Concerns the past

• Agency – Has actors or entities that cause and ex-

perience events

• Narrator – Has a teller who gives account of the

story

• Reader – Is received by someone who needs to

recognize the artifact as a narrative

The Developer’s Journey was developed with

those characteristics of a narrative in mind. Its pur-

pose is the exchange of experiences in software de-

velopment. It is built around a structured sequence

of events connected to each other and has the devel-

oper as a uniﬁed subject and other persons and enti-

ties involved. Developers report from their past ex-

periences, which may also incorporate an outlook for

the future. The story is told by the developer and re-

ceived by fellows in spoken form. That created the

framework for the design of the Developer’s Journey.

4 THE JOURNEY

The Developer’s Journey, which is illustrated in Fig-

ure 1, centers on a software developer, who devi-

ates from the deﬁnition of an as-is and to-be state,

faces a series of tasks and challenges until reaching

its climax, which is putting the developed solution

into practice, and completes it with follow-up orders,

maybe rework, and gained knowledge in hand. We

deﬁne the eight steps as follows.

The Developer’s Journey: A Storytelling Framework for Cooperative Learning in Software Engineering

527

4.1 Departure

The developer starts his or her story in the Ordinary

World, which represents the baseline situation before

any action or operation is taken. At this stage, an

overview of the different technologies and systems

that play a role in the upcoming journey as well as

their conﬁgurations at the outset is given.

It is followed by The Call To Adventure, which

can be the order of a customer, a user story that needs

to be implemented or a sudden system failures re-

sulting from unforeseeable and unavoidable circum-

stances. The developer explains the purpose of the

endeavor and clariﬁes the objectives and limitations

of the work.

4.2 Initiation

The Mentors and Helpers supply the developer with

tools and inspiration needed to accomplish the adven-

ture. These are recurring characters over the course of

the journey, such as project participants, colleagues or

external individuals. While clients can be seen as the

mentors who set the course of the journey, colleagues

are the helpers who assist in ﬁnding a satisfying solu-

tion.

A range of smaller tasks needs to be completed on

The Road of Trials, which leads to the achievement

of the speciﬁed target. At this point, the narrative in-

volves breaking down the problem into smaller pieces

so that the audience can follow more easily. Since

we know that active learning thrives on trial-and-error

problem solving, both accurate and futile approaches

should be pointed out. This prevents listeners who

might ﬁnd themselves in a similar situation from try-

ing the same fruitless attempts.

The Ordeal refers to the release of the developed

solution. When a software system implementation or

update becomes operational, it becomes ofﬁcially and

formally available to users for productive use. The go-

live is typically the most critical milestone in a devel-

opment cycle, as it marks the culmination of weeks,

months and sometimes even years of groundwork, de-

sign and development involving a company’s internal

and external stakeholders. The developer describes

the execution of the go-live, release management as

well as the methods applied (i.e. continuous deliv-

ery).

The ﬁnal result of the development process rep-

resents The Boon. The developer demonstrates the

working solution and practice examples in a hands-

on way so that participants get a clear picture of the

attainment. If practical, the audience can be directly

involved.

4.3 Return

The Road Back depicts all the activities that happened

after the release. The support phase begins when a

system solution becomes operational and continues

until it reaches the end of its useful life. The developer

outlines change requests, alterations and feedback of

clients received so far.

The Return with Special Knowledge is the ﬁnal

stage on the Developer’s Journey. The developer

gives a summary and discusses the lessons learned to

generate additional value for the audience. It should

be made clear to the colleagues in the audience on

which topics the developer has become an expert and

can henceforth provide assistance and support. The

option to consult an expert of a certain topic may lead

to additional motivation to ﬁnd solutions to similar

problems, or may at least promote discussions with

that expert, which could improve the knowledge of

the colleague in the future.

5 EVALUATION

5.1 Data Collection

The evaluation is based on two online surveys applied

before and after the intervention and semi-structured

interviews. The online surveys are designed to mea-

sure problem-solving skills before and after the in-

tervention and include rating scale questions for self-

assessment. The interviews were conducted retro-

spectively with ﬁve randomly selected participants to

get in-depth feedback.

Self-assessment responses allow a classiﬁcation

of the experimental group and analysis of personal

attitudes toward the intervention. Rating scale ques-

tions related to perceived competence and knowledge

required, task value and achievement goal orientation

serve as classiﬁcation criteria for the experimental

group. Additional rating scale questions were posed

to reﬂect on intrinsic motivation, ﬂow state, perceived

learning success and comprehension of the method.

The rating scale questions are in the ﬁve-point Likert

scale format and listed in Table 1.

A one-group pretest-posttest design has been used

to evaluate the learning outcome occurring as a result

of intervention. The problem-solving items involve

scenarios in which the respondent takes the role of a

cloud developer that has to evaluate information re-

lating to actual business cases and make design de-

cisions. A correct answer represents the only possi-

ble implementation option. Figure 2 shows a sample

item. Each of the two tests contained six multiple-

CSEDU 2022 - 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

528

Figure 2: Problem-solving sample item.

choice questions measuring problem-solving ability

before and after the intervention. They were pro-

vided by those who designed and presented the sto-

ries. Comparison of the pretest and posttest results

provides evidence of the effectiveness of the inde-

pendent variable (the intervention). If the pretest and

posttest scores differ signiﬁcantly, the difference may

be attributed to the intervention. But because there is

no control group, this inference is uncertain, and the

difference might be caused by extraneous variables.

There is also no way of judging whether the process

of pretesting inﬂuenced the results, since there is no

baseline measurement against groups that remained

completely untested.

Five semi-structured interviews with randomly se-

lected participants were conducted after the interven-

tion to obtain more in-depth feedback. Open-ended

questions should be a trigger for the participants to

comment freely and in as much detail as they like.

Narrators were questioned about their experiences

with the creation of their journeys. Recipients were

asked how they assess the value and quality of the

form of presentation. Thematic analysis was used to

summarize and analyze the responses.

The target group consists of software engineers in

the cloud computing domain. The Developer’s Jour-

ney was tried out in an in-company continuous edu-

cation program, which brings employees of different

company sites together and gives them the possibility

to exchange experiences and practices. The course

as well as the surveys were carried out online due

Table 1: Self-assessment questionnaire.

1. Software Development Task Value

1.1 I enjoy software development.

1.2 It’s important to me to be someone being

good at software development.

1.3 I am fascinated by the many possibilities that

software development offers.

1.4 The exchange with my colleagues makes

sense, because I can beneﬁt from their expe-

rience.

2. Perceived Competence

2.1 I am an experienced software developer.

2.2 I can also complete difﬁcult tasks in software

development if I don’t give up.

2.3 I am sure that I can master the skills taught in

software development courses.

3. Achievement Goal Orientation

3.1 It is important to me that I constantly im-

prove my skills in software development.

3.2 I want to expand my software development

skills in this course.

3.3 It is important to me that I thoroughly under-

stand the concepts discussed in the Meetup.

4. Procedural Knowledge (PK) Req.

4.1 For my work as a software developer, I need a

lot of procedural knowledge (knowing-how).

5. Descriptive Knowledge (DK) Req.

5.1 For my work as a software developer, I need a

lot of declarative knowledge (knowing-that).

6. Perceived Learning Success: PK

6.1 I feel like I’ve improved my procedural

knowledge (knowing-how) in this lesson.

7. Perceived Learning Success: DK

7.1 I feel like I’ve improved my declarative

knowledge (knowing-that) in this lesson.

8. Intrinsic Motivation

8.1 Today’s session was entertaining.

8.2 I would attend such a session again.

8.3 I could imagine preparing a story in this form

myself.

8.4 I have some ideas I would like to present.

9. Flow State

9.1 My attention was fully focused on the stories.

9.2 The stories were lively and captivating.

9.3 Time has passed quickly.

10. Comprehension of the method

10.1 The structure of the stories was clear and un-

derstandable.

10.2 I feel like I understood all the steps of the

journey.

10.3 There were no ambiguities.

The Developer’s Journey: A Storytelling Framework for Cooperative Learning in Software Engineering

529

to Covid-19 restrictions in Austria (Wolfschwenger

et al., 2021). The course follows community-based

learning principles, meaning that it is intended to in-

tegrate constructive community engagement with in-

struction and reﬂection to create reciprocal learning

opportunities and mutually beneﬁcial partnerships. A

mix of didactic methods provide the building blocks

for contributions to the course.

5.2 Data Analysis

5.2.1 Self-assessment

Figure 3 shows the average values for the logically

grouped sections of the self-assessment inquiry. 73%

of participants categorized themselves as experienced

or very experienced software developers. Although

being considered someone who is outstandingly good

at software development is only moderately impor-

tant, two thirds of all participants are conﬁdent that

they can accomplish even the most difﬁcult software

development tasks if the necessary time and effort is

put in.

The participants feel high interest, usefulness and

importance of software development tasks, and it is

important to them to continuously improve their de-

velopment skills and understand the concepts dis-

cussed in the monthly meetings. The majority (68%)

ﬁnds the exchange with colleagues very useful in or-

der to beneﬁt from each other’s experiences and ex-

pertise.

When being asked what kind of knowledge they

need for their work, the participants strongly agreed

that a high level of knowledge about how to per-

form a speciﬁc skill or task (“know-how”, procedu-

ral knowledge) is needed, knowledge of speciﬁc facts

or propositions (“knowing-that”, descriptive knowl-

edge) is only moderately needed in their profession

as software developers. In the associated open-ended

part, it was added that quality awareness, logical

thinking, creativity, depiction of complexity in a sim-

ple and readable manner, discipline and perseverance

are important skills.

The posttest measured that the sessions were

found enjoyable, and 72% of participants highly rec-

ommend taking part in such sessions again. The ma-

jority conﬁrmed that they understood and could re-

produce the structure of the method. The attitude to-

wards preparing a story in the form of the Developer’s

Journey was positive, although the data shows a gap

in terms of active contribution to the course. While

about half of the listeners declared to have a variety

of ideas, others were still uninspired at the time of

inquiry. Participants were immersed in a moderately

high feeling of energized focus and involvement dur-

ing the sessions, but their attention was steadily di-

rected towards the stories and the time passed quickly.

In terms of learning success, participants per-

ceived an improvement in knowledge in both the pro-

cedural and declarative sphere. In particular, a greater

increase was averagely seen in the declarative do-

main. Although the difference is only minimal, this

is in contrast to the collected data on the knowledge

required.

5.2.2 Problem-solving

In all of the three sessions, an increase in problem-

solving ability could be determined from pretest to

posttest. While the amount is signiﬁcant in the ﬁrst

and second sessions, improvement is only moderate

in the third session. Figure 4 illustrates average suc-

cess in the competence enhancement check for each

session before and after the intervention.

Looking at the individual responses in detail, it

is noticeable that a lower level of motivation and

ﬂow state is related to a lower score on the problem-

solving tasks. Less experienced participants also pro-

vided fewer correct answers in the tests. Since al-

most all participants considered the exchange with

colleagues to be useful, no direct correlation between

achievement goal orientation and better test results

could be found.

The test items provided through the online ques-

tionnaire were similarly structured, corresponded in

terms of complexity and relevance and were designed

in such a way that participants were able to answer

them following engagement in the sessions. The tests

measured change in participants’ skills needed for ap-

plying the acquired knowledge to comparable soft-

ware development problem-solving tasks. The items

were related to the stories presented and addressed

the learning objectives that were agreed upon with the

speakers in the preparation phase.

5.2.3 Interviews

Narrators reported that they sometimes had difﬁculty

setting up their stories within the structure of the

framework. Sequences in which essential parts of

a typical software project are missing (e.g., projects

without a software release or unﬁnished work) ﬁt only

partially into the framework.

Also, it is sometimes difﬁcult to present the re-

sults of the work (”The Boon”), for example, when

there are no test cases or no user interface. Still,

they agreed that the framework helped them to pre-

pare their stories in a way that was understandable

and did not leave out important information.

CSEDU 2022 - 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

530

Figure 3: Arithmetic means of the self-assessment ratings (n=31).

Figure 4: Average percentage of correct answers for each session in the problem-solving test (n=31).

Recipients stated that the consistent structure of

the narratives made it easier for them to keep the

thread in their eyes. The stories were always struc-

tured the same way, so they knew which parts con-

tained the main information and were particularly

worth listening to.

Partly, however, the unchanging structure also led

to boredom. There should not be too many sto-

ries told in a row. Overall, they felt that they came

to important information that they would otherwise

never have learned. In informal conversations, work-

mates usually tend to mention only the most impor-

tant aspects and don’t pay attention to every detail.

The Developer’s Journey promoted awareness of the

links between different aspects like software require-

ments, involved stakeholders, implementation proce-

dures, releases and subsequent work.

6 DISCUSSION

The collected data indicates that the application of

the Developer’s Journey had a positive effect on par-

ticipants’ problem-solving ability. On the one hand,

this is evident from the problem-solving measure-

ment, where a signiﬁcant improvement was achieved

in two of three cases. On the other hand, the self-

assessment questionnaire and interviews conﬁrm that

participants had the subjective impression of having

enhanced their declarative and procedural knowledge.

The composition of skill levels of the experimen-

tal group for which the program was designed ﬁnds

expression in the collected responses. We were deal-

ing with a group of experienced software developers,

and the averages of task value, achievement goal ori-

entation and perceived competence are consistently

in the upper range. It is likely that experienced soft-

The Developer’s Journey: A Storytelling Framework for Cooperative Learning in Software Engineering

531

ware developers require different knowledge than be-

ginners and the ratio of declarative and procedural

knowledge growth varies from responses of unexperi-

enced developers.

Our pretests and posttests were designed for an

experienced group of software engineers with prior

knowledge in application development. But also the

few participants with a lower level of perceived com-

petence were able to improve from pretest to posttest.

This gives an indication that the method might be use-

ful for groups of less experienced developers as well.

The high level of intrinsic motivation the results

show implies that the participants engaged for intrin-

sic rewards rather than having concern for any poten-

tial external reward they might receive. It is important

to rely on methods that trigger inner enthusiasm, as

intrinsic motivation can affect human behavior more

intensely than extrinsic motivation (Oudeyer and Ka-

plan, 2007). Using a method too often can become

repetitive, reduce engagement and lead to a loss of

motivation and adherence to the intervention (Singh,

2016). Used sparingly, the Developer’s Journey pro-

vides an opportunity to mix things up and keep learn-

ers’ attention.

Many studies show a connection between intrinsic

motivation and ﬂow (Rheinberg and Engeser, 2018).

A prerequisite of attaining ﬂow is voluntary engage-

ment in a task that the individual ﬁnds enjoyable.

When we perform an activity over a continuous pe-

riod of time with a balance between the difﬁculty of

the challenge and the skills of the individual, we are

more likely to experience ﬂow. The cohesive and

guided process, which allows to focus on the story

and make the common thread of a story visible, may

support coming in this state. However, transitions and

breaks between stories may disrupt the ﬂow.

The overall high level of motivation indicates that

the application of the Developer’s Journey was well

received by the participants and created a strong in-

centive for engagement. We saw improvement in

problem-solving skills and also a subjective sensation

of learning success. This combination makes us con-

ﬁdent that the method has had positive effect on the

participants.

7 CONCLUSION

We presented a storytelling concept based on NL

principles for cooperative learning in software engi-

neering. It was evaluated in the context of a post-

secondary cloud computing education program for

software engineers. The storytelling concept was in-

spired by the Hero’s Journey, a common template

of stories in narratology and comparative mythology

and adapted as a didactic method tailored to the spe-

cial needs of a software development continuous edu-

cation program. It should help software developers

to prepare and share their experiences in the form

of instructive narratives, with the goal of activating

transformative learning processes in others as well as

themselves.

Many developers pursue the same objectives, fol-

low the same development paths and solve similar

problems without learning from each other’s experi-

ences. With the guidelines of the Developer’s Jour-

ney, software developers should be enabled to pre-

pare and present their lived experiences in a structured

and effective manner. Sharing experiences with each

other is a pillar for interconnected relations, mutual

assistance and long-lasting partnerships. The eval-

uation of the Developer’s Journey led to a positive

outcome in terms of learning success and enthusiasm

for the method. There is a positive correlation be-

tween the application of the framework and partici-

pants’ problem-solving ability. It also seems to have

a stimulating effect for the participants, which is re-

ﬂected in the high level of intrinsic motivation and

ﬂow state.

In order to come to conclusions regarding the

question if the ﬂow state can be triggered by the use of

this NL method, further research is needed measuring

the ﬂow state over a longer period of time. The recur-

ring structure of the Developer’s Journey provides a

promising opportunity to design learning experiences

so that transformative learning happens more regu-

larly. The results indicate that a ﬂow state could be

reached.

In community-based learning, a narrative frame-

work can be effectively used as a tool to create partic-

ipatory, immersive and contextual experiences. While

narrators are given a chance to structure and reﬂect

upon overcome problems and achievements, listeners

are drawn into a simulated adventure that helps them

to learn from others’ experiences. To facilitate the

adoption and exploitation of NL in software engineer-

ing, further templates and guidelines are needed.

The Developer’s Journey has proven to be a mo-

tivating and promising approach to the further de-

velopment of cloud developers in community-based

learning. There are still many challenges with re-

gard to cloud adoption in the education sector (Wolf-

schwenger and Sabitzer, 2020). Different understand-

ings and attitudes towards strategy, security, legal,

ethical and other issues still exist. Especially in terms

of awareness formation for groups concerned other

than IT staff, the use of the Developer’s Journey may

also be a helpful tool.

CSEDU 2022 - 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

532

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