The effects of physicality on the child's imagination

Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of physical objects as support for imagination in the context of enactive storytelling. More specifically, we target nine-year-old children because of their general disengagement from creative activity, a phenomenon known as the Fourth-grade Slump that arises from a demotivational spiral brought on by social awareness. We study how enactment using physical objects may allow the child to better engage in story imagination. Our study compares the richness of the imagination under three main enactment conditions with objects that have varying degrees of fidelity to referent objects: Cultural objects (physical visual resemblance); Physical objects (similar physical affordances); Arbitrary objects (minimal physical and visual affordances). We employ a mixed-methods analysis to gauge the child's level of broader imagination from three data sources: Enactment videos, drawings and interviews with the children. We found that the object types significantly differ in their support of the imagination, with the object of highest specificity being most effective. Our findings can inform the design of embodied creativitysupport systems for children.

The effects of visual contextual structures on children's imagination in story authoring interfaces

“…One possible explanation that has been advanced for the decline is the intensification of social awareness in the child, which causes the child to selfevaluate her output more negatively. This in turn leads to a drop in the child's self-efficacy, and a consequent decline in motivation to engage in creative activities [9,10].…”

Understanding the Practices and the Products of Creativity

“…This study builds upon a growing body of literature on creativity support tools that is concerned with designing and exploring the effectiveness of collaborative ideation systems [16,33,42] and appropriate design of physical tools that support creativity and imagination [12][13][14][15]. The majority of these studies define tools as having properties of a technologically-enhanced physical or virtual device.…”