StoryScaffold

Example

Inspiration

Early childhood education often gets left behind when it comes to new technology. While most LLM developments focus on logic and reasoning, we wanted to create an tool to help parents bond more children during story time.

What it does

The app does two main functions. The primary one takes any story and breaks it down into natural learning moments throughout the reading for interaction. Research has shown that interaction during stories helps children comprehend better and learn more vocabulary. link

The questions are "scaffolded" - meaning they start simple and gradually build up complexity to help children think through problems step by step without getting overwhelmed. This guides them toward deeper understanding of emotions, cause-and-effect, and critical thinking skills.

We also included an option to generate brand new age-appropriate stories when you need fresh content.

Important note: Human interaction remains essential. The app doesn't replace parents or caregivers, it gives them better tools to make storytime more educational and engaging.

How we built it

We used Ollama to serve gpt-oss locally with basic Node.js/Express server to handle API requests and a straightforward frontend interface using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

Getting the prompt right was difficult. We wanted the questions and scaffolding to be meaningful and build on top of each other, so that took many iterations to tune properly. Creating questions that naturally progress from simple observations to deeper thinking while staying age-appropriate required a lot of trial and error. Tied into this was our hardware limitation. We only had 8GB of VRAM, so running the unquantized gpt-oss took significant time, but it was worth it. Two major advantages of gpt are its safety features, making it suitable for children, and its excellent instruction-following capabilities.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We got it working to our standards! Most importantly, children responded positively to the interactive stories. It was validating to experience. Plus, we no longer need to think of educational questions ourselves.