TaleBot: A Tangible AI Companion to Support Children in Co-creative Storytelling for Resilience Cultivation

TL;DR

TaleBot is an AI system designed to help children build resilience by co-creating stories about overcoming adversities, fostering self-expression and enabling personalized support from teachers and parents.

Contribution

This paper introduces TaleBot, a novel AI-powered storytelling system tailored for children to develop resilience through adversarial scenarios, informed by formative research and evaluated in real settings.

Findings

Encourages children's self-expression of feelings and thoughts

Enables teachers to provide personalized support

Helps parents understand the impact of family communication

Abstract

Resilience is a key factor affecting children's mental wellbeing and future development. Yet, limited HCI research has explored how to help children build resilience through adversarial experiences. Informed by a formative study with elementary school teachers and professional psychologists, we design TaleBot, an AI-empowered system that supports children to co-create stories about overcoming everyday adversities tailored to their personal situations. We evaluated the system with 12 elementary children in school counseling rooms under teacher guidance and conducted reflective interviews with parents upon the Child-AI co-created stories. The findings show that TaleBot encourages children in self-expression of feelings and thoughts, creating opportunities for teachers to provide personalized support and for parents to better understand the profound impact of family communication on children's mental wellbeing. We conclude with design implications for using generative AI to support children's mental health education and interventions across school and family contexts.