Research & Code
Papers, code, and what we are learning
Story Sprout began with a summer camp. We wanted to improve children's literacy, so we inverted a familiar idea: instead of AI making things for children, children would write their own stories and direct the AI to illustrate them.
That first workshop was highly engaging — but the commercial image site we used showed inappropriate ads and was not built for children. So our team built its own. Three students spent ten months building it, from August 2025 to June 2026.
The children's engagement made us ask why the curriculum worked. We cold-emailed 25 professors in the learning sciences and child–computer interaction; three replied with advice and papers. After reading seventeen of them and continuing those conversations, we developed the Nested Cognitive Mirror — a framework for how children externalize, judge, and revise their own ideas. We tested the revised curriculum and platform in summer 2026.
- 1PapersWhat we have written, with its publication status.
- 2Open sourceThe studio's full source, under an MIT licence.
- 3BlogOur own write-ups, and coverage of Story Sprout elsewhere.
1. Papers
Story Sprout: A Picture-Book Studio Where Children Direct the AI and Keep the Pen
Submitted to NeurIPS 2026Story Sprout is a browser-based picture-book studio for children, built around an explicit allocation of agency that is enforced in the system itself. Children originate every sentence of the story and every illustrated scene detail; the model's role is confined to drawing the illustration and redrawing it when the child asks for changes. After each generation the system asks the child whether the picture matches what they imagined — it never makes that judgment for them. The paper presents the agency framework, the deployed system, its layered safety mechanism, the aspects of the allocation that could be contested, and how the design was shaped by classroom workshops.
2. The studio is open source
Story Sprout Studio runs entirely in the browser. The whole thing — the page children write on, the content safeguard, and the way it talks to the image model — is published under an MIT licence. Anyone can read it, check what it actually does, or run their own copy.
For a tool used by children, we think being able to look inside matters more than being told it is safe.
3. Blog
Write-ups from the classroom and the build, plus articles about Story Sprout published elsewhere.
What Children's Creative Writing Taught Us About Responsible AI Use
A member of the Story Sprout team writes for Digital Promise about keeping children in control of their own stories — the AI only illustrates scenes they have already written — and why examining and revising those images is practice in responsible AI use.
Published by Digital Promise