Generative AI in the Design of Metaphorical Cards for Fairy-Tale Reception: A Design Case Study

This design case study examines how generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used to design a teaching resource within a doctoral project on literary reception among preschool and primary school children (ages 5–10) in Romanian-language minority education in Hungary. The aim is twofold: to describe the resource and to document the AI-assisted co-design procedure through which it was produced; implications for teacher education are discussed as proposals rather than findings. Building on Vladimir Propp’s morphology of the fairy tale and on the “Propp cards” proposed by Gianni Rodari, the author developed 40 metaphorical cards in four sets of ten: “The Story Gang” (characters and their roles), “Abracadabra” (symbolic and magical objects), “Adventure” (narrative functions) and “Emotico” (emotions). Following the logic of educational design research, the procedure comprised needs and theory analysis, iterative generation with ChatGPT, selection against explicit pedagogical, developmental and ethical criteria, review by the doctoral supervisor and teachers, and classroom use in the formative stage of the doctoral research. The new element is not the idea of Propp-based cards, which goes back to Rodari, but a four-set architecture linking structure, symbol and emotion, and its AI-assisted production. In this case, decisions on content, images and age appropriateness remained with the author. The paper discusses the teacher competences such a process requires, the limits of screening AI-generated images for bias, and the need for empirical studies of AI-assisted resource design.