Interactive Storybooks for Early AI Literacy

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly present in children's everyday environments, there is an urgent need for developmentally appropriate tools that help young learners understand and shape these technologies. To be effective, these tools must not only successfully convey complex concepts but also engage children in ways that are meaningful, accessible, and fun.

This thesis introduces the Interactive Storybooks for Early AI Literacy, a series of ten interactive storybooks for children ages 6–9 that combine narrative, mini-games, and scaffolded creative AI interactions to teach core AI and robotics concepts. The storybooks follow an overarching narrative featuring a friendly robot, Doodlebot, who must learn creative tasks with the child's help, framing the child as an AI designer and introducing them to the concept of training AI models through the narrative. The storybooks additionally contain interactive games and activities which help keep kids excited and engaged, while providing structured opportunities to experiment with and explore AI creation tools.

First, a pilot study was conducted at a community summer camp with four Interactive Storybooks. Children expressed joy and pride in their AI creations, used the characters as emotional anchors for learning, and began to successfully articulate key AI concepts. Four engagement archetypes emerged: the Reader, the Gamer, the Showcaser, and the Social Connector, each representing a distinct way children interacted with the storybooks. However, despite behavioral signs of engagement, many children described the narrative portions as boring and claimed to prefer games.

To explore this tension, a home deployment study compared two versions of the system: a "Books" condition with the full narrative and a "Games" condition with only instructional text. Both conditions included the same mini-games and AI interactions. While children in both groups reported similar levels of enjoyment, those in the Books condition showed significantly higher learning gains, greater increases in perceived knowledge and confidence, and stronger connections to the characters. Children in the Books condition also more frequently referenced the narrative when describing AI concepts and demonstrated more creative and iterative behavior during and after gameplay.

Overall, these findings suggest that combining storytelling, gameplay, and creative AI interactions is an effective and engaging approach to teaching AI and robotics to young children. Narrative context appears to support concept recall, deepen emotional investment, and promote thoughtful experimentation, even with complex concepts for this age group, like AI and robotics. Based on insights from both studies, this thesis concludes with six design recommendations for creating developmentally appropriate, emotionally resonant AI education tools for early learners using narrative and play.