Connection is All You Need: A Multimodal Human-AI Co-Creation Storytelling System to Support Children's Multi-Level Narrative Skills

Children develop narrative skills by understanding and actively building connections between elements, image-text matching and consequences. However, it is challenging for children to clearly grasp these multi-level links only through explanations of text or facilitator's speech. To address this, we developed Colin, an interactive storytelling tool that supports children's multi-level narrative skills through both voice and visual modalities. In the generation stage, Colin supports facilitator to define and review generated text and image content freely. In the understanding stage, a question-feedback model helps children understand multi-level connections while co-creating stories with Colin. In the building phase, Colin actively encourages children to create connections between elements through drawing and speaking. A user study with 20 participants evaluated Colin by measuring children's engagement, understanding of cause-and-effect relationships, and the quality of their new story creations. Our results demonstrated that Colin significantly enhances the development of children's narrative skills across multiple levels.