Designing and Evaluating: A Multimodal AI Story Co-Creation System for Supporting Children’s Post-Conflict Reflection

Peer conflict is a common and developmentally meaningful social experience in children’s school life. However, existing interactive technologies have mainly focused on immediate mediation or conflict skills training, whereas established approaches such as attributional intervention, restorative practices, reflective learning, perspective taking, conflict debriefing, and social information processing have rarely been integrated within a single AI-supported system for children’s post-conflict reflection. Based on social information processing theory, this paper presents Kindom, a multimodal AI-supported story co-creation system for children aged 6–8 years. Through neutral prompts, role-based perspective switching, revision-oriented narrative branches, and Qwen-generated co-created narrative endings and researcher-mediated visual summaries, Kindom supports children in event review, emotion recognition, intention inference, and strategy generation and evaluation. This study adopted a two-stage Research through Design approach. First, formative interviews were conducted with 10 primary school teachers and 4 educational experts to identify design needs and develop system design goals. A one-month mixed-methods quasi-experimental study was then conducted to compare the performance of 40 children under the Kindom condition and a matched picture-book condition. The results showed that children in the Kindom group had significantly lower hostile attribution than those in the control group (p < 0.001, d = 1.175), and significantly higher positive response generation (p < 0.001, d = 2.109) and positive response evaluation (p < 0.001, d = 1.577). Qualitative analysis further showed that children shifted from hostile interpretations to contextualized interpretations, from a single-character perspective to an understanding of both parties’ emotions, and from direct responses to constructive strategies such as negotiation, repair, and help-seeking. These scenario-based task results suggest that multimodal AI-supported story co-creation may provide structured, low-pressure, process-oriented scaffolding for children’s social information processing and post-conflict reflection. This study proposes a four-stage support model for children’s post-peer-conflict reflection, designs and implements a child-centered multimodal AI-supported story co-creation system, and provides preliminary mixed-methods evidence based on scenario tasks. Its main contribution lies in integrating AI-supported multimodal story co-creation, sequential SIP-based reflection, structured revision of children’s initial interpretations, and traceable interaction logs.