Coding through Storytelling: Narrative Reasoning and Software Engineering Education

Volume 16, Issue 2 (November 2025), pp. 5–9

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@article{jocse-16-2-2,
  author={S. Charlie Dey and Jeaime H. Powell and Victor Eijkhout and Joshua Freeze and Susan Lindsey},
  title={Coding through Storytelling: Narrative Reasoning and Software Engineering Education},
  journal={The Journal of Computational Science Education},
  year=2025,
  month=nov,
  volume=16,
  issue=2,
  pages={5--9},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.22369/issn.2153-4136/16/2/2}
}

To become a successful software engineer, technical competence alone is not enough. Students must learn to reason about their code, articulate their intentions, and locate errors with clarity and confidence. This paper introduces a pedagogical approach rooted in the metaphor of "telling a story." By encouraging students to narrate their code—identifying protagonists (variables), plotlines (control flow), and conclusions (outputs), we promote a practice of self-explanation that strengthens metacognitive awareness and debugging skills. Drawing from experiences in the classroom, we show how storytelling helps students pinpoint bugs, communicate intent, and ultimately write more understandable code. We connect these practices with existing research on metacognition, program comprehension, and human-centered computing, and describe how this narrative approach provides a scalable, inclusive, and transferable tool for future computational engineers and scientists.