The impact of combining storytelling with lecture on female students in software engineering education

Software engineering courses are characterized by heavy theoretical and complex concepts that might be challenging to teach while keeping students engaged in the classroom, which might impact them from pursuing software engineering careers later. Software engineering is well known to be a male dominated field even though the first software engineer was a woman. Research has shown that storytelling can be used to improve students and teachers engagement in primary and secondary education. However, there is a lack of research on storytelling application and efficiency in higher education to teach complex concepts. This study explored the impact of combining a story with lecture on undergraduate female students in a software engineering course. We investigated the following hypothesis: Combining storytelling with lectures can improve the female students interest in software engineering. A questionnaire study has been conducted with 24 female undergraduate students in the classroom. Students had no prior knowledge on software engineering before the study. The questionnaire was designed to be simple to motivate students to participate in the study. It contained three questions to capture the interest of female students in pursuing a career in software engineering: prior to the lecture, after the lecture, and after the story. The results showed that the story incorporated in the lecture had great impact on female students perception about software engineering. Combining storytelling with software engineering lectures seems a promising tool to engage female students in higher education and increase their interest in pursuing a career in software engineering.