Storytelling in Education

Storytelling in education — the use of narrative as a pedagogical tool to engage learners, convey meaning, and support knowledge construction, creativity, and emotional connection. Storytelling is a natural and motivating way for learners to make sense of the world, and it is increasingly combined with technology — including AI and social robots — to create interactive, adaptive narrative experiences. Digital and robot-mediated storytelling can add interactivity, personalization, and embodiment that conventional (paper-based or slide-based) storytelling lacks.

Questions to Consider

• Think of a lesson or concept you remember vividly because it came as a story. What did the narrative add that a plain explanation didn't, and can that power survive being outsourced to an AI or a robot?
• The page describes robot- and LLM-mediated storytelling that responds to the learner and supports co-creation. What do you imagine is gained — and potentially lost — when a story is co-built with a machine instead of told by a person?
• If storytelling builds engagement, creativity, and emotional connection, where might its use in education be more than entertainment — and where might it risk substituting feeling for understanding?
• A robot storyteller increased behavioral and cognitive engagement over paper and PowerPoint in the research cited. Do you trust that engagement translates into learning, or could the novelty of the robot be doing the work?
• How could you tell whether a learner is genuinely making meaning from an AI-co-created story versus just enjoying the interactive experience?

Introduction

Storytelling is grounded in Motivation, Student Engagement, and Constructivism theories of learning. It supports Language Learning, Creativity, Social-Emotional Learning, and comprehension. In the AI era, LLM-powered and robot-mediated storytelling enables co-creation, where learners and AI agents build stories together, and interactive narrative that responds to the learner.

How storytelling appears in the knowledge base's research

• Robot-mediated storytelling: MotiBo uses a human-like interactive digital storytelling robot, finding significant gains in behavioral and cognitive engagement over paper and PowerPoint methods; RoboBuddy lets teachers create LLM-powered scenario-based storytelling activities from curriculum content.

• Engagement gains have a size, and motivation did not follow. MotiBo finished 27.06% and 30.00% ahead of paper and PowerPoint on behavioral and cognitive engagement (both p < .05), while intrinsic motivation rose 20.21% without reaching significance (p = .07). Engagement moved, motivation did not clear its threshold, and the five-day quasi-experiment measured no learning outcome (Fung & Lui, 2026).

• Co-creative narrative HRI: The iCub narrative study explores human-robot co-creation of stories, integrating generative models for contextually appropriate interaction.

• Narrative and creativity: Storytelling supports Creativity and language development, and is used to enhance motivation and engagement in K-12 settings.

• Digital storytelling as a counterweight to AI: As generative AI ascends, digital storytelling is reframed as a vehicle for the emotional, cultural, and narrative capacities that AI lacks. In a project-based learning model for art and design education, students translated local cultural heritage into Multimodal AI narratives across 92 digital storytelling works, demonstrating how storytelling sustains human creativity in the AI era.

• Generated narrative is easy to produce and hard to keep coherent. With 22 STEM students, AI-generated interactive fiction rated well on narrative clarity (M = 4.11) and length (M = 4.14), but engagement sat at the neutral midpoint (M = 3.08) and story-content coherence was weakest (M = 2.92) (AI-Generated Interactive Fiction for Educational Use: A Pilot Study of Perceived Comprehensibility, Coherence, and Engagement). Co-creation inherits that weakness at the layer a story is supposed to do its work.

• The story is the evaluative frame, not just the destination for the output. In a Turkish preschool, 22 children built picture books with a teacher who wrote every image prompt. Their judgments of the generated images were about story fit — which of four candidates the class would keep, whether an extra object "like a pilot" belonged, whether an image was ugly because a requested flower was missing — set alongside plausibility judgments such as "a butterfly with glasses cannot be" (Konca & Yigit-Gencten, 2026). Storytelling gave the class a reason to inspect outputs feature by feature, which is what made their reasoning about the tool visible at all.

Storytelling connects to Student Engagement, Motivation, Creativity, Robots in Education, Language Learning, Social-Emotional Learning, and Robots in Education.

Common Misconceptions

"A co-built story is a told story." What is gained is fluency and volume; what is at risk is the teller's authorship. A story is a structuring of experience by someone who chose the sequence and the emphasis, so a machine that supplies the structure has supplied the part that carries the meaning.

"Storytelling is a soft addition to content." Narrative is a memory and sense-making device, and the learner who narrates is doing the organizing work. Handing over the narration hands over the learning.

"AI generation makes storytelling available to students who could not write." It makes producing a written artifact available, which is a different benefit. Oral narration, drawing and dictation are the established routes to the same goal, and they preserve the authorship that generation removes.

"The educational value of a story is in the polished result." It is in the construction — the selection and ordering that a teller performs. A polished story the student did not structure has demonstrated the model's competence rather than the learner's.

Connected Concepts

• Student Engagement
• Motivation
• Creativity
• Robots in Education
• Language Learning
• Social-Emotional Learning

Connected Articles

• MotiBo: The impact of interactive digital storytelling robots on student motivation through self-determination theory — MotiBo
• RoboBuddy in the classroom: Exploring LLM-powered social robots for storytelling in learning and integration activities — RoboBuddy
• Would you let a humanoid play storytelling with your child? A usability study on LLM-powered narrative human-robot interaction — iCub Narrative HRI
• Play-testing REMind: Evaluating an educational robot-mediated role-play game — REMind
• Robotics and Artificial Intelligence in Education: Transformations, Challenges, and Future Directions — Robotics and AI in Education
• AI-Generated Interactive Fiction for Educational Use: A Pilot Study of Perceived Comprehensibility, Coherence, and Engagement — AI-generated interactive fiction: coherence as the weak dimension in a 22-student pilot
• Generative AI as an interactive learning environment in early childhood: preschool children's emerging AI literacy as socially distributed interpretive work in collaborative storytelling — preschool picture-book building where story fit and plausibility became the criteria for judging AI images (Konca & Yigit-Gencten, 2026)