A Planning Approach to Story Generation for History Education

Effective history instruction often relies on taking historical episodes and making them personally relevant to the learner. One narrative-centered technique for accomplishing this is to tell a story about the historical episode in which significant historical events are witnessed or even, to some small degree, influenced by a fictional character. Given individual differences among users, the ability to generate historical fictions that are adapted to a particular learner is essential. Historical fiction generation is a special case of general narrative generation that imposes constraints on the form of the solution story. We describe how a narrative planner, specifically the Fabulist narrative planner, is capable of generating historical fictions for educational purposes.