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

TL;DR

This paper introduces Tinker Tales, a tangible storytelling system that facilitates meaningful child-AI co-creative collaboration through narrative and social-emotional scaffolding, supported by an exploratory user study.

Contribution

It presents a novel tangible storytelling system with scaffolding that enables children to engage in co-creative storytelling with AI, filling a gap in child-AI interaction research.

Findings

Children viewed AI as an attentive collaborator.

Scaffolding supported coherent story development.

Children maintained agency during co-creation.

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.