CO-OPERA: A Human-AI Collaborative Playwriting Tool to Support Creative Storytelling for Interdisciplinary Drama Education

2025-06-01

AI Summary

Current AI tools lack domain-specific support for interdisciplinary scriptwriting in drama education. Method: This study develops an interactive, human–AI collaborative scriptwriting assistant featuring a novel “divergent–convergent” dual-mode collaboration framework: an AI tutor stimulates creative ideation through dialogue-based prompting, while actionable intelligent agents perform structured element generation and demand-driven iterative rewriting. The system integrates role-anchored LLM agents, domain-customized prompt engineering, a visual script editor, and a user-intent feedback loop. Contribution/Results: Empirical evaluation with middle-school students demonstrates enhanced focus on holistic narrative logic construction, significantly improved writing concentration, and greater pedagogical alignment. The source code and pedagogical case studies are publicly released.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Multiagent Systems: Teamwork

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Assisted, interactive, and conversational search

Abstract

Drama-in-education is an interdisciplinary instructional approach that integrates subjects such as language, history, and psychology. Its core component is playwriting. Based on need-finding interviews of 13 teachers, we found that current general-purpose AI tools cannot effectively assist teachers and students during playwriting. Therefore, we propose CO-OPERA - a collaborative playwriting tool integrating generative artificial intelligence capabilities. In CO-OPERA, users can both expand their thinking through discussions with a tutor and converge their thinking by operating agents to generate script elements. Additionally, the system allows for iterative modifications and regenerations based on user requirements. A system usability test conducted with middle school students shows that our CO-OPERA helps users focus on whole logical narrative development during playwriting. Our playwriting examples and raw data for qualitative and quantitative analysis are available at https://github.com/daisyinb612/CO-OPERA.

Problem

• Enhances interdisciplinary drama education through AI-assisted playwriting
• Addresses limitations of general-purpose AI tools in creative storytelling
• Supports iterative narrative development with human-AI collaboration

Innovation

• Human-AI collaborative playwriting tool
• Generative AI for script elements
• Iterative modifications based on user input