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

TL;DR

Tinker Tales advances child–AI collaboration by integrating tangible story elements with voice-based AI in a scaffolded, narrative-driven framework. Grounded in Applebee’s narrative development and CASEL’s SEL, the system externalizes process phases, ties child contributions to evolving outcomes, and supports repair and flexibility in dialogue. An exploratory home study with 10 children shows that structured educational scaffolding fosters narrative elaboration while preserving children’s agency, and that children perceive the AI as a responsive partner capable of maintaining meaningful collaboration through interactional repairs. The work offers practical design insights for scalable, co-creative AI systems in education, highlighting how tangible interfaces and carefully framed prompts can enable effective, child-centered human–AI creative activities.

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.

Figures (18)

• Figure 1: Physical setup of Tinker Tales. The system includes a storytelling board structured into four narrative stages, NFC-embedded character pawns and place, item, emotion tokens, and a mobile device that mediates voice interaction and NFC-based input. Each pawn and token is labeled on the reverse side with a corresponding word representing the story element.
• Figure 2: Overview of the Tinker Tales mobile application. The app supports child-facing storytelling interaction, including voice- and NFC-based play and story replay, as well as parent-facing features for reviewing child–AI interaction histories and activity summaries.
• Figure 3: Interaction flow of Tinker Tales, showing a recurring co-creative loop in which children shape the story through tangible manipulation and voice interaction, while a mobile app mediates the child-AI communication.
• Figure 4: Distribution of children’s narrative contributions in response to different agent question types. For each question framing (Primitive narratives, Chain narratives, Social awareness, Open invitation), the figure shows the proportion of child responses categorized by narrative function according to our coding scheme (Table \ref{['tab:coding_scheme']}).
• Figure 5: Excerpt from a Climax-stage interaction (P3, Structured) after selecting Cave (Place), Lantern (Item) and Scared (Emotion). Highlighted text in the updated story marks changes introduced by the child and taken up by the agent.