Tinker Tales: Supporting Child-AI Collaboration through Co-Creative Storytelling with Educational Scaffolding

2026-02-04

AI Summary

Current child–AI interactions are largely confined to AI-led instructional settings and lack mechanisms that support creative collaboration. This work proposes a tangible storytelling system integrating narrative and socio-emotional scaffolding, which—through NFC-embedded manipulatives representing characters, locations, objects, and emotions, a physical story board, and voice interaction—introduces educational scaffolding into child–AI co-creative contexts for the first time. The design preserves narrative coherence while effectively safeguarding children’s authorial agency. User studies reveal that children perceive the AI as an attentive and responsive collaborator, and that the scaffolding mechanism significantly facilitates iterative story refinement, thereby enabling genuine collaborative co-creation.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Intelligent Robots: Embodied AI

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Agentic search
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly framed as a collaborative partner in creative activities, yet children's interactions with AI have largely been studied in AI-led instructional settings rather than co-creative collaboration. This leaves open questions about how children can meaningfully engage with AI through iterative co-creation. We present Tinker Tales, a tangible storytelling system designed with narrative and social-emotional scaffolding to support child-AI collaboration. The system combines a physical storytelling board, NFC-embedded toys representing story elements (e.g., characters, places, items, and emotions), and a mobile app that mediates child-AI interaction. Children shape and refine stories by placing and moving story elements and interacting with the AI through tangible and voice-based interaction. We conducted an exploratory user study with 10 children to examine how they interacted with Tinker Tales. Our findings show that children treated the AI as an attentive, responsive collaborator, while scaffolding supported coherent narrative refinement without diminishing children's agency.

Problem

• child-AI collaboration
• co-creative storytelling
• educational scaffolding
• iterative co-creation
• tangible interaction

Innovation

• co-creative storytelling
• child-AI collaboration
• educational scaffolding
• tangible interaction
• NFC-embedded toys