Example Reflection – Storytelling

Challenge and Selection

Storytelling has proved to be a vital tool in my life that has helped me expedite and  improve the outcomes of projects. As an undergraduate student in computer science, I work with budding programmers and spend my time solving problems for a living. A  particular challenge that we faced in the early years at my own university was, that  students were unable to bring their theoretical knowledge and their problem-solving  skills to the machine and implement their solutions as good programs. This was a  very important problem, as it was solely responsible for the deteriorating confidence  of the students and the low quality of education in the university. Surprisingly, using  storytelling as a subtle but meticulously planned tool, we were able to gain a lot of  confidence in our programming skills and subsequently won many competitions.  Storytelling is the most fundamental of the tools, that doesn’t just impact the  quantitative results that most organizations care about, but also affect the people  emotionally.

Application

Improving the quality of programming education and particularly, the problem of  lack of motivation in the students was a problem that required an emotional impact as well as quantitative results. Storytelling seemed to be the perfect tool. The story that  my colleagues and I decided to go ahead with, was that of the legendary programmers and computer scientists. Every day, we began to pick one famous personality in  computer science and went through their work thoroughly. Not only did we immerse  ourselves deeply in the problems that they were trying to solve at that time, we were  intrinsically motivated to solve those problems ourselves as we already knew the  significance of their work.

Insight and Approach

What our professors quickly realized was that the problem was not the lack of quality education, but the lack of confidence that encumbered the students from writing great code. They decided to go ahead with the “daily throwback” model of teaching, where  they presented problems like: writing the algorithm for google search, solving the  shortest path problem etc. When these problems were tied closely with the stories of  the legendary scientists who worked so hard to produce their work, many students  found it so interesting that they never went home until they had at least figured out  how to solve the problem, even if they didn’t have concrete programs running. To  solve the problem of under-confidence, students were paired. Pair-programming was  also implemented after researching about Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat (legendary computer scientists). This practice helped the students in being more open and  garnering an expanded purview about things. Pair programming turned out to be

immensely helpful (following Dean and Ghemawat’s story) as compared to a single  person sitting on a machine and bashing her head if she were unable to solve a  problem. Two people always found some ground that they could build on, to solve  problems. Every day, we told ourselves a story about great minds and how they  solved problems. These stories motivated the students and collecting the many pearls  of wisdom from these stories (example: pair-programming) enabled us to be more  confident in our skills, learn so much more, win major competitions and by every  metric, prove that the quality of education had increased immensely, just by the  simple act of telling ourselves a new story everyday.

