Drama-in-education is an interdisciplinary instructional approach that integrates subjects such as language, history, and psychology. Its core component is playwriting. Based on need-finding interviews of 13 teachers, we found that current general-purpose AI tools cannot effectively assist teachers and students during playwriting. Therefore, we propose CO-OPERA - a collaborative playwriting tool integrating generative artificial intelligence capabilities. In CO-OPERA, users can both expand their thinking through discussions with a tutor and converge their thinking by operating agents to generate script elements. Additionally, the system allows for iterative modifications and regenerations based on user requirements. A system usability test conducted with middle school students shows that our CO-OPERA helps users focus on whole logical narrative development during playwriting. Our playwriting examples and raw data for qualitative and quantitative analysis are available at https://github.com/daisyinb612/CO-OPERA.
@article{arxiv.2506.00791,
title = {CO-OPERA: A Human-AI Collaborative Playwriting Tool to Support Creative Storytelling for Interdisciplinary Drama Education},
author = {Xuejiao Ma and Haibo Zhao and Zinuo Guo and Yijie Guo and Guanhong Liu and Bo Jiang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.00791},
year = {2025}
}