Authoring Educational Hypercomics assisted by Large Language Models

Interactive stories can be an effective approach for teaching purposes. One shortcoming is the effort necessary to author and create these stories, especially complex storylines with choices for the readers. Based on recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), new opportunities arise for assistance systems in the context of interactive stories. In our work, we present an authoring approach and prototypical tool for the creation of visual comic-strip like interactive stories, a type of hypercomics, that integrate an Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistance. Such comics are already used in our Gekonnt hanDeln web platform. The AI assistance provides suggestions for the overall story outline as well as how to design and write individual story frames. We provide a detailed description about the approach and its prototypical implementation. Furthermore, we present a study evaluating the prototype with student groups and how the prototype evolved in an iterative style based on the students’ feedback.