Abstract
New immersive storytelling practices for children aged 6-13 years old blend reading, immersive theatre and gaming to invite child participants to believe that a story has come to life, allowing them to co-create the narrative alongside adult practitioners through their embodied participation, creative writing and drawing undertaken during the experiences. These immersive story worlds are being used in urban sites of literacy, like schools, public libraries and theatres to aid children's reading, writing and speaking development, as well as in the field of children's literature and media studies as a participatory research methodology to allow children to make visible the hidden mental processes they undergo in their negotiation of belief in stories with other children and adults. This project investigates the potential of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) to amplify children's co-creative capacity within these immersive story worlds. The children's dialogue, creative writing and drawing produced within the immersive experience can be used as a dataset from which AI can generate further settings, plotlines, and characters for the children to explore. Immersive story worlds draw children's attention to questions of authorship and who is creating the experiences. This means they can function as powerful arenas in which to boost children's critical media literacy, their awareness of how invisible AI algorithms and computational processes are increasingly structuring their participation with media. Raising critical media literacy is a key imperative to citizen's wellbeing in an increasingly digitalised world. This research proposes a practice-based, participatory methodology to create and stage a new AI-enabled immersive story world with children at the stakeholder group of emergent immersive storytelling centres across Europe that are newly serving as participatory hubs that unite the wider urban children's literacy eco-systems.
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