The YouthMADE Festival is a global celebration of youth creativity and innovation that invites students, educators, and advocates to showcase youth-led work. Leading up to the 2027 YouthMADE Festival, we are sharing a series of stories highlighting youth creators and changemakers around the world who are putting their hands, hearts, and minds toward projects and causes they care about.
In this story, high school student Alice writes about the Story Sprout project with her teammates Jack and Cindy. Their project received a 2026 YouthMADE Festival Amplify Grant, sponsored by Ciena.
Story Sprout is a free creative-writing program for children ages 7–13. Children create original characters and plots, write their own picture-book stories, and then use artificial intelligence (AI) to generate illustrations for scenes they have already written.
Our goal is to keep children in control of the creative process. The AI does not invent the plot, write the story, or decide which illustration is correct. The children remain the authors.
The project is important to us because children need opportunities to use AI critically rather than treating it as an authority. We want children to leave the program with a completed story, but also with the confidence to say, “That is not what I meant. Let me try again.” That ability to examine, question, and revise is at the heart of both creative writing and responsible AI use.
Story Sprout grew out of our work with children at the Salvation Army Bay Area center in Newark, California. Before Story Sprout began, I was teaching basic science there each week. During summer 2025, the center director asked us to create a meaningful summer activity for children attending the center’s summer camp.
The community influenced both what we teach and how we designed the project. We work with children in a community summer-camp setting. The children have different levels of writing experience, confidence, and familiarity with technology, so the program needs to be flexible, collaborative, easy to use, and appropriate for younger students.
Our first major milestone was developing and teaching the original Story Sprout curriculum. The children moved through the complete storytelling process: brainstorming, creating characters, planning a plot, drafting, revising, describing illustrations, reviewing the AI-generated images, and sharing the finished story with an audience.
The next milestone was completing the first summer workshop. Watching the children work helped us understand that the most meaningful part of the program was not simply producing an attractive AI-generated image. The important moments happened when children explained what they meant, disagreed with an illustration, defended a character detail, or revised their language to communicate an idea more clearly.
The limitations of public AI websites led to our next milestone: developing Story Sprout Workshop. We began creating a simpler browser-based environment with stronger safeguards and fewer distractions.
During the platform development we reached out to the education and learning sciences researchers for feedback. Some of the leading experts in the field provided substantial suggestions. We added a voice-input option so younger children can speak their descriptions. We also added Pip, a friendly AI illustrator avatar, and created a Teacher’s Page as we began preparing the project for broader educator use.
One of the most surprising things we learned is that an AI-generated illustration does not need to be correct in order to be educational. A “wrong” picture can help a child think more carefully about what they intended to communicate. The difference between the child’s mental image and the generated result creates a meaningful reason to revise.
We have also learned that adding more AI features does not automatically make an educational platform better. A responsible learning tool can be powerful because of what it refuses to do. By not writing the story, silently rewriting the child’s description, or judging which result is best, StorySprout Workshop leaves the most important thinking and creative decisions with the child.
The most important lesson was that progress came from repeatedly noticing problems, testing solutions, and improving both parts of the project together. Story Sprout did not grow because our first version was complete. It grew because we kept revising the curriculum, developing the platform, and learning from each new workshop.
A Story Sprout workshop in action
We applied for an Amplify Grant because generating AI illustrations has a real financial cost. Story Sprout is intended to remain free for participating children, families, and community organizations, but every image the children generate uses paid credits or computing resources. We hoped the grant would help us purchase image-generation credits so more children could complete their books without cost becoming the limiting factor.
Since receiving the Amplify Grant, we have purchased $100 in AI image generation credits, added significant new platform features, and started another summer camp program at the Newark Salvation Army center. Forty children have participated since the award.
Our long-term goal is not only to lead more Story Sprout workshops ourselves. We want educators in classrooms, libraries, community centers, and after-school programs to be able to adopt the curriculum and Story Sprout Workshop platform and use them with their own students.
As the project grows, we want to preserve its central principle: children should remain the authors. AI can illustrate and respond to their ideas, but it should not replace their imagination, writing, judgment, or voice.
