Position paper proposes a narrative design framework to enhance AI literacy in young children, suggesting effective delivery methods.
Children encounter AI through consumer media long before it is formally taught, and those first impressions are often shaped by two misconception-seeding tropes: the "magic box" that thinks and feels, and the "robot takeover." Curricular frameworks specify what young children should learn about AI, but not how to deliver those concepts through the narrative media - picture books and characters - that four-to-eight-year-olds actually encounter. This position and design paper contributes the AIverse Scaffolding: a compact, standards-aligned, theory-grounded, and rubric-scorable authoring contract for pre-literate AI-literacy narratives. It comprises three narrative invariants (Curiosity-First, Collaborative Intelligence, Error-Positive) with an Anti-Dystopian Mandate, a five-tier non-redundant concept progression crosswalked to AI4K12/ISTE/CSTA, and an eight-item conformance rubric. The framework is offered as a reusable, complementary design pattern; an empirical validation agenda is proposed.
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Sivaraman Krishnan (2026) studied this question.
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