Learning electronics through storytelling

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) initiatives have expanded to include 'art' with the moniker: STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math). This acknowledges the importance of creativity in the technical fields and poses the question: How do we incorporate art into the engineering classroom? This paper presents one attempt to incorporate the art of storytelling in a first-year engineering design course in January 2021. It was found that compared with students who received a traditional lecture to learn basic electronic concepts, the students who used an illustrated storybook to learn the same concepts took significantly less time to replicate a sample circuit (p < .001), and performed better in a post-activity assessment (p > .05). These results indicate that the use of storytelling can be an effective way to transmit technical content in an engineering classroom, and further studies should be pursued.