STORYCODE Final Webinar: From Classroom Experience to Practical Guidelines for Narrative Coding

On 28 August 2026, the STORYCODE partnership held its final online webinar, “CODING & DIGITAL STORYTELLING IN SCHOOLS – Final Guidelines from the STORYCODE Project”, bringing together project partners, teachers and education professionals to share the main outcomes of three years of European collaboration.

The event marked the final dissemination event of the STORYCODE project and offered an opportunity to move from research and classroom experimentation to practical recommendations that teachers can use when introducing collaborative narrative coding in kindergarten and primary education.

The webinar was opened by Giuseppe Iandolo, Universidad Europea de Madrid, who recalled the central question behind STORYCODE: how can young children move from being passive users of technology to becoming active creators of their own digital stories?

The answer developed throughout the project has been to connect coding with storytelling, creativity, collaboration and meaningful learning.

Recorded Webinar

Final Guidelines for Teachers

Angela Tardivo, Universidad Europea de Madrid, presented the final STORYCODE Guidelines for Teachers: Designing, Implementing and Assessing Collaborative Narrative Coding Activities in the Classroom.

Rather than proposing a fixed protocol, the guidelines provide a flexible framework that teachers can adapt to children’s age, readiness, classroom organisation, available resources and inclusion needs.

One of the central principles emerging from the project is that narrative coding should not be treated as an isolated technology activity. It works best when linked to meaningful curriculum content. A narrative coding project may begin with a storybook or oral tale, but also with a science topic, a mathematical route, a social-emotional theme, a local tradition, an environmental issue or a question generated by the children themselves.

Learning objectives can consequently extend well beyond coding. Activities may simultaneously address computational thinking, narrative competence, collaboration, creativity, curriculum learning, inclusion and self-regulation.

Another key message is the importance of gradual progression. Especially with younger children, the recommended pathway moves from physical and unplugged experiences towards increasingly tangible, hybrid and digital forms of coding:

start with the body → continue with cards and objects → move gradually to tangible and digital tools.

Readiness, rather than chronological age alone, should guide the level of complexity.

Collaboration and inclusion need active support

Collaboration was another major theme of the guidelines.

The project experience suggests working mainly in small groups of approximately three to five children, with intentional group composition, shared decision-making and rotating responsibilities.

Possible roles include story planner, designer, coder, tester, debugger, narrator or sound lead. These roles also provide an important mechanism for inclusion: meaningful participation does not require every child to use the digital device in the same way.

During the discussion, Angela Tardivo gave the example of a child who may not yet be ready to record or work directly with a digital tool but can contribute by drawing characters or settings. Other members of the group can subsequently scan those drawings and incorporate them into the digital story.

The underlying principle is simple: inclusion should be considered before difficulties become barriers. Visual guidance, reduced command choices, non-verbal forms of participation, predictable routines, pair work and adult or peer support can all be used to adapt the learning experience.

From planning to implementation

The guidelines also provide a practical cycle for classroom implementation:

prepare → introduce the story challenge → plan the narrative → plan the commands → construct → test → debug → enrich → share → reflect and document.

Teachers are encouraged to act as facilitators rather than immediately solving problems for children. Questions such as “What needs to happen first?”, “Which command represents that action?” or “What can we test before adding more?” can help children develop their own problem-solving strategies.

Errors and debugging should also be treated as a normal part of learning rather than as failure.

Technology, meanwhile, should support the activity rather than become the activity. For this reason, teachers are encouraged to test devices, connectivity, scanning and saving procedures in advance and always prepare an unplugged fallback.

When technology fails, the learning objective does not need to change: children can move from the application to tangible cards, perform the sequence on a floor grid, create a storyboard or continue the story orally.

What did the free experimentation tell us?

In the second part of the webinar, Federico Albiero, Computer Learning, presented insights from the project’s free-experimentation strand, in which teachers were able to adapt narrative coding more freely to their classroom needs.

The project collected 31 documentation sheets describing learning objectives, competencies, phases, resources and assessment approaches. The free experimentation involved 584 children and 43 teachers across four countries, and resulted in 52 videos created with the I Code application. Together with the research strand, STORYCODE reported reaching more than 1,000 children during the project.

The classroom experiences varied considerably in length and content, but a recurring pathway emerged:

storytelling → unplugged coding → collaborative planning → digital coding → creation of a final artefact → shared viewing and reflection.

Teachers consistently highlighted the value of unplugged preparation, small-group work and teacher mediation.

Collaborative assessments indicated high levels of inclusion and participation, while collaboration tended to improve when roles were clearly assigned. Challenges included waiting times, turn-taking, self-regulation, unequal participation and the practical difficulty of managing several groups simultaneously.

Student feedback was particularly encouraging: more than 80% of the analysed satisfaction questionnaires indicated high enjoyment. Children particularly valued working together, using digital tools, recording their own voices and seeing the digital artefacts they had created.

From coding to empathy: a classroom example

The webinar concluded with a concrete classroom practice developed at Scuola Ladina di Fassa, involving two fourth-grade classes working on the topic of bullying through narrative coding.

Children developed a story, created a storyboard, distributed roles, programmed the actions and produced a final digital video.

The experience showed how narrative coding can combine computational skills with much broader educational goals. Children had to reason together, make hypotheses, solve coding problems and negotiate decisions. At the same time, imagining and animating characters encouraged them to explore emotions and different perspectives—an especially important dimension when addressing bullying.

The teachers also identified real constraints: translating ambitious story ideas into technically feasible coding, managing time, ensuring sufficient devices and obtaining good-quality audio recordings in ordinary classroom conditions.

These challenges are an important part of the STORYCODE experience. They reinforce one of the main conclusions of the project: effective narrative coding does not depend on technological complexity, but on thoughtful pedagogical design, flexibility and meaningful participation.

One child’s comment captured the sense of ownership generated by the activity:

“We did it all ourselves. We were proud to do it.”

A project ending, and a resource for future classrooms

The final webinar marked the conclusion of the STORYCODE project, but the resources developed through the partnership will remain available to teachers, schools and researchers.

The complete STORYCODE Guidelines for Teachers, project resources and video guidelines can be accessed through the STORYCODE website. Video guidelines are available in English, Italian, Spanish, Lithuanian and Dutch.

The experience developed across the four participating countries leaves a clear message:

Narrative coding is not only about coding. It can help children think, create, collaborate, solve problems and tell meaningful stories together.

And perhaps the most important lesson from STORYCODE is that the methodology works best when teachers are able to plan, observe and adapt—keeping the learning goal at the centre while allowing different children and different classrooms to follow different pathways.