Escape!Bot

Nisha Devasia,Safinah Ali,Cynthia Breazeal

doi:10.1145/3383668.3419895

Abstract

Children's creativity plummets as they enter elementary school. Social interactions with peers and playful environments have been shown to foster creativity in children. Digital pedagogical tools often lack the creativity benefits of co-located social interaction with peers. In this work, we leverage a social embodied robot as a playful peer and designed Escape!Bot, a game involving child-robot co-play, where the robot is a social agent that scaffolds for creativity during gameplay. We aim to investigate the factorial extent to which the robot's embodiment (the co-presence of a peer-like social embodied agent), and scaffolding (the expression of creativity scaffolding behaviors by the social agent), influence children's creativity during gameplay. We contribute a novel social robotic interaction paradigm that aims to foster creative expression during gameplay.

Highlights

The importance of creativity cannot be understated
We explore whether social robots can promote higher creative expression than virtual agents, due to their unique ability to act as intelligent peers, as well as their capability for social emotional expression [5, 18]
We introduce a novel child-robot interaction aimed at fostering creativity in young children

Summary

Introduction

The importance of creativity cannot be understated. Generally referred to as the ability to produce novel yet appropriate solutions to a problem [22], creativity has been shown to improve children’s problem solving and adaptability skills. We explore whether social robots can promote higher creative expression than virtual agents, due to their unique ability to act as intelligent peers, as well as their capability for social emotional expression [5, 18] To this end, we designed a game-based child-robot interaction aimed at fostering children’s creativity. We designed a game-based child-robot interaction aimed at fostering children’s creativity It employs a digital tablet-based game that affords creative problem solving, and is played alongside a co-present robotic peer that offers scaffolding for creative expression through verbal and non-verbal interactions. In designing this child-robot interaction to foster creativity in children, we utilize three key factors: an embodied agent, a play-based activity, and creativity scaffolding behaviors. Research in human-robot interactions has demonstrated how interaction with social robots can promote positive learning behaviors in children through social emulation, such as curiosity, verbal creativity, and growth mindset [1, 10, 24]

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Conclusion