Unravelling the Educational Power of Interactive Digital Narratives in Childhood Learning

Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN) hold great potential in enhancing children’s learning experiences, being proved to offer numerous positive outcomes such as increased engagement and interest in specific subjects, helping to build social bonds, developing empathy and improving their technological skills. Over the years, there has been progress in creating IDNs that target children as users for entertainment and learning purposes. However, there is still a need for empirical studies on the use of pedagogical IDNs for children, as it is still a field in development that has yet to be fully established or implemented in the educational realm. This work explores how interactive digital narratives can enhance the educational experience for children and achieve educational objectives. While the first part of the paper addresses the pedagogical potential of IDNs, in the second part, a qualitative user study was conducted with 12 children from Portugal, where six children interacted with an IDN about global warming and six viewed a presentation on the same topic. Based on the user tests, a framework describing the key features to ensure pedagogical value in IDNs for childhood learning is proposed.