# Tinker Tales: Interactive Storytelling Framework for Early Childhood Narrative Development and AI Literacy

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13969 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13969/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [AI Hospital: Benchmarking Large Language Models in a Multi-agent Medical Interaction Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09742/) (2024)
- [EtriCA: Event-Triggered Context-Aware Story Generation Augmented by Cross Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12463/) (2022)
- [Cue Me In: Content-Inducing Approaches to Interactive Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09935/) (2020)
- [Persona-Guided Planning for Controlling the Protagonist's Persona in Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10703/) (2022)
- [NGEP: A Graph-based Event Planning Framework for Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10602/) (2022)
- [Towards Inter-character Relationship-driven Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00676/) (2022)
- [KidLM: Advancing Language Models for Children -- Early Insights and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03884/) (2024)
- [Do Current Video LLMs Have Strong OCR Abilities? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20613/) (2024)
- [Near-Field Communications: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05900/) (2024)
- [Measuring Contextual Informativeness in Child-Directed Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17427/) (2024)
- [OpenSep: Leveraging Large Language Models with Textual Inversion for Open World Audio Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19270/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Tinker Tales: A Tangible Dialogue System for Child-AI Co-Creative Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04109/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents Tinker Tales, an interactive storytelling framework in the format of a board game, designed to support both narrative development and AI literacy in early childhood. The framework integrates tangible and speech-based interactions with AI through NFC chip-attached pawns and tokens, along with a speaker and microphone. Children select and define key story elements-such as characters, places, items, and emotions-using the pawns and tokens, providing further details to the AI and receiving proper assistance, similar to how adults prompt AI for specific tasks (e.g., writing). For evaluation, several game sessions were simulated with a child AI agent, and the quality and safety of the generated stories were assessed from various perspectives. This work highlights the potential of combining physical and digital elements in AI literacy, offering a safe and engaging way for children to learn how to effectively collaborate with AI.