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

TL;DR

CO-OPERA is a collaborative AI-powered playwriting tool designed to enhance interdisciplinary drama education by supporting creative storytelling and iterative script development.

Contribution

It introduces a novel human-AI collaborative system tailored for educational playwriting, integrating discussion and agent-based script generation functionalities.

Findings

Improves focus on logical narrative development during playwriting

Supports iterative modifications and regenerations based on user input

Demonstrates usability with middle school students

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.