'HistoChat': Leveraging AI-Driven Historical Personas for Personalized and Engaging Middle School History Education
Yeon Soo Kim, Hyun Seung Moon, Sangsu Lee, Tak Yeon Lee · Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025
Traditional history education often fails to cultivate historical empathy due to rigid curricula and limited opportunities for personalized, emotionally resonant engagement. We explore the potential of LLM-based historical personas to address these gaps by enabling students to engage in real-time, conversational interactions with simulated historical figures. A formative study with teachers and students surfaced key challenges and expectations around AI-mediated historical dialogue, informing the development of Baseline and Experimental HistoChat, AI persona systems featuring differing prompting strategies. A subsequent user study showed that these interactions fostered deeper inquiry, curiosity, and emotional engagement-while also revealing key limitations. From a CSCW perspective, this work expands the role of AI from task assistant to epistemic partner, contributing to ongoing discourse on how dialogic systems can support meaning-making, empathy, and co-constructed learning in educational settings. Our findings yield valuable insights into the impact of tailored AI interactions on personalized and empathetic history education.