Exploring What AI Can Support in Theatre Education

In Week 2, we began by researching how digital tools and AI are already being used in theatre and drama education.

We looked at platforms such as Stage Write, which helps directors plan actor movement through visual stage maps; Kuraplan, which generates drama lesson plans and classroom activities; and Offbook, where actors can rehearse lines with an AI scene partner. These examples showed us that the most useful tools are not necessarily the most complex. Teachers need fast, clear support that fits naturally into their existing classroom practice.

Our research also identified several challenges in children’s theatre education:

• Teachers often need to adapt activities for students with different abilities, group sizes, and learning needs.
• Children can have imaginative but fragmented ideas that are difficult to capture and develop into a coherent story.
• Teachers may not have specialist theatre training or enough preparation time.
• During rehearsal, students need support remembering dialogue, movement, props, entrances, and stage positions.

From this, we explored several design directions. These included an AI story-to-script companion, a collaborative production platform with a 2D stage canvas, an AI improv training tool, and a projection-enhanced modular scenography tool.

We also began early prototyping. Our initial concept focused on transforming lesson-plan inputs into a short script, a stage map, a cue sheet, and visual assets for a classroom performance.