Boosting Children's Reading Motivation with LLM-Generated Story Crossovers

It is widely recognised that reading is essential for children's education. Nevertheless, the hours children should spend reading are increasingly being replaced by hours in front of tablets, phones, or computer screens. To counter this trend, we developed a tool that allows educators to create stories that combine children's interests with literary classics. The goal is to motivate the reading indirectly through children's interests. The tool exploits the generative capabilities of ChatGPT to create compelling crossovers between literature classics and children's interests. The tool was developed under the design participatory paradigm. A user study conducted in Lisbon, Portugal with 20 children shows a positive experience with the tool and an increase in motivation to read the classics after using it. This paper presents the design, development, and evaluation of the tool.