Social Robots as Creativity Eliciting Agents

Abstract

Can robots help children be more creative? In this work, we posit social robots as creativity support tools for children in collaborative interactions. Children learn creative expressions and behaviors through social interactions with others during playful and collaborative tasks, and socially emulate their peers’ and teachers’ creativity. Social robots have a unique ability to engage in social and emotional interactions with children that can be leveraged to foster creative expression. We focus on two types of social interactions: creativity demonstration, where the robot exhibits creative behaviors, and creativity scaffolding, where the robot poses challenges, suggests ideas, provides positive reinforcement, and asks questions to scaffold children’s creativity. We situate our research in three playful and collaborative tasks - the Droodle Creativity game (that affords verbal creativity), the MagicDraw game (that affords figural creativity), and the WeDo construction task (that affords constructional creativity), that children play with Jibo, a social robot. To evaluate the efficacy of the robot’s social behaviors in enhancing creative behavior and expression in children, we ran three randomized controlled trials with 169 children in the 5–10 yr old age group. In the first two tasks, the robot exhibited creativity demonstration behaviors. We found that children who interacted with the robot exhibiting high verbal creativity in the Droodle game and high figural creativity in the MagicDraw game also exhibited significantly higher creativity than a control group of participants who interacted with a robot that did not express creativity (p < 0.05*). In the WeDo construction task, children who interacted with the robot that expressed creative scaffolding behaviors (asking reflective questions, generating ideas and challenges, and providing positive reinforcement) demonstrated higher creativity than participants in the control group by expressing a greater number of ideas, more original ideas, and more varied use of available materials (p < 0.05*). We found that both creativity demonstration and creativity scaffolding can be leveraged as social mechanisms for eliciting creativity in children using a social robot. From our findings, we suggest design guidelines for pedagogical tools and social agent interactions to better support children’s creativity.

“And then what happens?” Promoting Children's Verbal Creativity Using a Robot

“…Research describes different types of creativity, as well: (1) figural creativity, related to the development of visual artifacts (i.e., drawing, painting, sketching) [19], (2) performance creativity [20], related to the creation of performance arts (i.e., music, dance, theater), (3) constructional creativity [4], which represents building and tinkering (e.g., using LEGO blocks), and (4) verbal creativity, related to the verbal presentation of ideas and thoughts (i.e., writing, storytelling, poetry) [19].…”

“…For instance, a recent study [5] showed that participating in an activity to program a robot had a higher positive impact on children's creativity skills than participating in one to design a robot or participating in a music activity. In a different setting, children participated in three one-to-one creativitycollaborative tasks with a JIBO robot to address verbal, figural and constructional creativity [4], [6], [31]. The authors aimed to investigate the effects of the robot's creative behavior on children's creativity skills.…”

“…Creativity in children facilitates critical thinking, self-expression and communication [3]. Since social robots are more present in educational settings as children's companions, researchers have investigated their effectiveness in stimulating children's creativity [4], [5]. Previous work has shown that robots with embedded creativity skills prompt children to be more creative [6].…”

Constructionism, Ethics, and Creativity: Developing Tools for the Future of Education with AI

“…Already, pedagogical agents have been shown to scaffold valuable learning behaviors like creativity, growth mindset, curiosity, empathy, and grit. The agents modelled these positive behaviors, then guided and encouraged users to display these behaviors during interactive activities [17]- [19]. This led to significant increases in students expressing and acting out these behaviors.…”

CreativeBot: a Creative Storyteller Agent Developed by Leveraging Pre-trained Language Models

“…Recently, researchers in HAI have attributed great attention to the study of how to use agents in order to stimulate children's creativity. Previous research suggests that artificial agents exhibiting creativity skills positively impact children's creativity [1,2,3]. Researchers have assessed children's creativity after an interaction with a creative agent by using various types of tasks.…”