In 2024 THENCE forged a partnership with AI company, TinkerTell. The companies' teams came together with a singular goal in mind: to support child development. You can read about that here in Part I of this three part series. This article, Part II, explains how the founders have noticed themselves trying to solve Deep Tech problems, which in turn have started to drive the company's ambitions and goals.
One thing everyone should know about TinkerTell is that it is fun.
It's not just a kind of "Oh, that's cool" type of fun. It's sticky fun. Also, it's a parenting game changer. TinkerTell is a storytelling app that harnesses generative AI to produce safe, entertaining, and developmentally appropriate short stories. So why is that a game changer?
Unlike apps that encourage zombie-like staring at streaming video, gratification through gaming, or hooking kids on hours of mindless scrolling, TinkerTell is typically used by a caregiver and a child together. The focus becomes the read-to-me paradigm, not so much the can-I-have-more-screen-time pleading.
The app's creators, Arianna Marsilio and Roberto Pellegrini, first made a TinkerTell prototype in 2023 to improve bedtime storytelling for exhausted parents. The first customer was their nephew who demanded fresh, imaginative stories every night featuring a red truck.
In the interim months, TinkerTell the app was born, but, so was the creators' daughter. While the app's first version was launched on both the Apple and Google Play stores, the new parents were busy figuring out the ups and downs of feeding, changing diapers, and sleep routines.
A willing tester
Pictured right is the creators' toddler. "I was amazed by how a baby orients themselves to story time they quickly know it's, like, a thing." says CEO, Ari Marisilio
Image: Toddler in festive pijamas on a green and white carpet reaches for colorful printout of a TinkerTell storybook.
The app is very intuitive and easy to use due to Marsilio's decades of UX design experience and deep knowledge of user behavior. "We wanted something that was so straight forward, that even grandparents could use it without asking, how does this work again?" she explained.
TinkerTell offers a way of thinking about storytelling that is unique. It encourages families to prompt a story, then take the created story offline, print it, create the "book", and design pictures for each story segment. This is all possible due to TinkerTell's unique print and craft feature that offers the story in a PDF version allowing users to fold the pages into a colourful child-sized book. No cutting or glue is required, but a stapler can help keep pages in place. Kids have the creative opportunities to add drawings on each page, showing how the narrative unfolds and connects the plot and characters.
Parents and educators alike may appreciate the consistent story quality, tone, length, safety features (inappropriate or poisonous prompts are rejected), and developmental appropriateness. All this is possible due to Pellegrini's machine learning background. A former Amazon ML scientist, Pellegrini has several papers published in ML and theoretical physics journals, the fields in which he has a PhD and two post-docs. "With TinkerTell it's important not to get distracted by adding a lot of new features," says Pellegrini who is able to estimate the model's costs, oversee training on proprietary data and fine tuning—all processes that keep the AI engine working efficiently and in sync with TinkerTell's mission and goals.
More on that in a moment.
These days, many educational apps use LLMs (large language models) that do something with written prompts, then return a response. However, many apps are simple "wrappers" on top of generative LLMs. TinkerTell is different in that it tackles deeper paradigms and problems that haunt AI, such as legacy biases, outdated perceptions, ugly stereotypes, and character portrayals that feel uneven, tired, unwanted and outdated. "These are deep learning challenges." adds Pellegrini, who feels confident in the model's progress to counter these phenomena.
One important driver for creating TinkerTell came from CEO Marsilio, who explains something she desired whilst searching for toddler books following the birth of her daughter, which later became a sort of company mission. "Let's talk about families wanting more representation in their storytelling." She begins.
"I wanted my daughter to see more protagonists that represent her..." explains Marsilio. "I wanted her to see girls climbing mountains in the stories I read to her!"
Marsilio is a keen mountain climber, yet was not aware of female climbers when she was a kid growing up in the rural Italian countryside of Piedmont. The closest big city with famous climbers was Torino an old industrial town, but the stories were all about the men. "Books with female climbers were scarce, or any girl protagonists for that matter." she adds. Indeed a key study, Racial and Gender Differences in the Relationship Between Children's Television Use and Self-Esteem, found that children who see characters who share their race or gender experience also hold higher levels of self-esteem.
It's easy to see how parents of young children can center their child as the protagonist by using the TinkerTell App as a safe, entertaining, and relatable go-to tool. "For kids, representation sends a simple but powerful message that you belong," says Marsilio. While pointing to a pile of recently crafted printed-out books generated and shared during field studies with families, she adds, "Parents like and want that validation for their child."
"When children see themselves positively represented in books and media, it has a direct impact on their self-worth. This is important for all children, but perhaps particularly so for those who are underrepresented, and who often don’t see their identities reflected in mainstream media." Says Marsilio who explains further that positive representation can counter prejudiced portrayals, and feelings of isolation due in part to invisibility in stories.
"I have seen fun apps come and go, and then get forgotten forever." says Katherine Schlatter CEO of THENCE, a boutique publishing company. Schlatter, who has her doctorate in education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a Masters in human development and psychology, from Harvard, adds "The longevity of a new software or an app, especially one that might be leveraged for child development and educational purposes, must offer something fun but also substantive. It must be trusted by parents, and verified by educators for it to last and make an impact," she adds.
Schlatter joined TinkerTell as the third co-founder in late 2024, and became increasingly interested in how users were also sharing their children's dreams, inspirations, desires, aspirations, and also perhaps their fears, anxieties, or learning, and mental health challenges. "That's a lot of data, and with that comes a lot of responsibility," observes Katherine, who is focused on helping parents, teachers, and health providers use the app in ways that are most beneficial to the children they serve.
Schlatter cites an example of how some parents may want to center their child who has a disability, but also not want the disability to be the center of the child's story. "Oftentimes a character who has a disability is portrayed as performing some extraordinary task with exceptional talent in order to be accepted by their peers. These narratives are unfortunately very common in story books, and now the legacy of those types of stories repeatedly show up in AI-generated stories," notes Schlatter.
In 2025 CEO Marsilio is focusing on reaching parents, educators and specialists with different needs and goals. "A key missions is meeting users exactly where they are in terms of their literacy journey," she explains. "Take the example of stories for toddlers, versus stories for early readers. Both early readers and toddlers need simple books," explains Marsilio. "However, the architecture of those stories is completely different as the target audience has very different needs," she adds. She ends by promising that TinkerTell is on track to satisfy the needs of both types of users.
THENCE — a company with the expressed mission of educational and health equity — advises TinkerTell about educational directions. But as the teams began work together, a kind of magic started to happen. You can read about that effort here in Part III published soon. Have comments or simply want to get in touch? See below to comment. Directly message us using the form to get in touch.