DOLLama: Fostering Family Anti-Bullying Learning through AI-Augmented, Toy-Mediated Educational Drama

Abstract

Educational drama is a proven method for anti-bullying education, but its traditional reliance on teachers and peers limits its accessibility to children and families outside of school. HCI has rarely explored how to augment this practice with AI-infused, interactive role-playing or how to involve parents in the process. We introduce DOLLama, an AI-powered projection-augmented interactive system that transforms children's toys and family-created stories into gamified anti-bullying vignettes. A study with 20 families demonstrated how DOLLama facilitated children's and parents' learning. Children used their toys to enact the roles of the one being bullied and bystanders, developing empathy and practicing coping strategies in co-performance with AI-controlled toy characters. By observing this play, parents gained new insights into their child's strengths and challenges and identified their own knowledge gaps. Based on these findings, we derive HCI design implications for AI-enhanced, toy-mediated educational drama that supports anti-bullying education for children and their families.