Mathemyths: Leveraging Large Language Models to Teach Mathematical Language through Child-AI Co-Creative Storytelling
<|reference_start|>Mathemyths: Leveraging Large Language Models to Teach Mathematical Language through Child-AI Co-Creative Storytelling: Mathematical language is a cornerstone of a child's mathematical development, and children can effectively acquire this language through storytelling with a knowledgeable and engaging partner. In this study, we leverage the recent advances in large language models to conduct free-form, creative conversations with children. Consequently, we developed Mathemyths, a joint storytelling agent that takes turns co-creating stories with children while integrating mathematical terms into the evolving narrative. This paper details our development process, illustrating how prompt-engineering can optimize LLMs for educational contexts. Through a user study involving 35 children aged 4-8 years, our results suggest that when children interacted with Mathemyths, their learning of mathematical language was comparable to those who co-created stories with a human partner. However, we observed differences in how children engaged with co-creation partners of different natures. Overall, we believe that LLM applications, like Mathemyths, offer children a unique conversational experience pertaining to focused learning objectives.<|reference_end|>
@article{zhang2024mathemyths:,
    title={Mathemyths: Leveraging Large Language Models to Teach Mathematical
  Language through Child-AI Co-Creative Storytelling},
    author={Chao Zhang, Xuechen Liu, Katherine Ziska, Soobin Jeon, Chi-Lin Yu,
  Ying Xu},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.01927},
    year={2024},
    doi={10.1145/3613904.3642647},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2402.01927},
    primaryClass={cs.HC}
}