Educational Robotics and Robot Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

Abstract

There is a growing literature concerning robotics and creativity. Although some authors claim that robotics in classrooms may be a promising new tool to address the creativity crisis in school, we often face a lack of theoretical development of the concept of creativity and the mechanisms involved. In this article, we will first provide an overview of existing research using educational robotics to foster creativity. We show that in this line of work the exact mechanisms promoted by robotics activities are rarely discussed. We use a confluence model of creativity to account for the positive effect of designing and coding robots on students' creative output. We focus on the cognitive components of the process of constructing and programming robots within the context of existing models of creative cognition. We address as well the question of the role of meta-reasoning and emergent strategies in the creative process. Then, in the second part of the article, we discuss how the notion of creativity applies to robots themselves in terms of the creative processes that can be embodied in these artificial agents. Ultimately, we argue that considering how robots and humans deal with novelty and solve open-ended tasks could help us to understand better some aspects of the essence of creativity.

Effectiveness of a Robot-Assisted Psychological Intervention for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Although technology is advancing at a rapid pace, supporting robotic therapy still faces several challenges. The collaboration between psychologists and programmers seems to have given a new impetus to the resulting product (Gubenko et al, 2021 ) with more recent trials reaching greater methodological quality (Robinson et al, 2019 ). Still, there are many obstacles that need to be overcome.…”

Teachers’ Perception for Integrating Educational Robots and Use as Teaching Assistants in Thai Primary Schools

“…The instructor could evaluate the learners in real time by engineering analysis data, i.e. by fixing start times and enabling quiz scores to be analyzed quickly, while predicted future learning results would adjust adaptive questions [47].…”

“…Barker and Ansorge [44] showed that students' learning achievement improved by using robots in science, while Kazakoff, Sullivan, and Bers [45] found that robots help the learning of how to write operation control programs. Other researchers have suggested that robots are effective at helping the learning of science, engineering, and technology [46,47].…”

Research on Educational Robot System Based on Vision Processing

“…P adjustment is carried out with the purpose of eliminating and reducing the error through the proportional adjustment link. Set the P parameter to 100, the speed input is 1000, and the actual speed output is stable at about 1000, as shown in Figure 16 , which is basically in line with the expected output [ 18 ].…”