Can Children Learn Creativity from a Social Robot?

Children's creativity contributes to their learning outcomes and personal growth. Standardized measures of creative thinking reveal that as children enter elementary school, their creativity drops. In this work, we evaluated whether a social robotic peer can help 6-10-year-old children think creatively by demonstrating creative behavior. We designed verbal and non-verbal behaviors of the social robot that constitute interaction patterns for artificial creativity. 51 participants played the Droodle Creativity Game with the robot to generate creative titles for ambiguous images. One group of participants interacted with the creative robot, and one group interacted with the non-creative robot. Participants that interacted with the creative robot generated significantly higher number of Droodle titles, expressed greater variety in titles, and scored higher on the Droodles' creativity. We observe that children can model a social robotic peer's creativity, and hence inform robot interaction patterns for artificial creativity that can foster creativity in children.

[1]  Robert W. Lissitz,et al.  A Methodological Study of the Torrance Tests of Creativity: Can Creativity Be Faked? Measurement and Statistics. , 1982 .

[2]  Bonnie Cramond.  Interview With E. Paul Torrance on Creativity in the Last and Next Millennia , 2001 .

[3]  E. Torrance,et al.  The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking , 2012 .

[4]  Clifford Nass,et al.  Participatory materials: having a reflective conversation with an artifact in the making , 2014, Conference on Designing Interactive Systems.

[5]  M. Runco.  Introduction to the Special Issue: Commemorating Guilford's 1950 Presidential Address , 2001 .

[6]  Brian Scassellati,et al.  The Physical Presence of a Robot Tutor Increases Cognitive Learning Gains , 2012, CogSci.

[7]  R. Beghetto,et al.  Why Isn't Creativity More Important to Educational Psychologists? Potentials, Pitfalls, and Future Directions in Creativity Research , 2004 .

[8]  Brian Scassellati,et al.  Social robots for education: A review , 2018, Science Robotics.

[9]  Yasmin B. Kafai,et al.  Minds In Play: Computer Game Design as a Context for Children''s , 1994 .

[10]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Creativity Support Tools: Report From a U.S. National Science Foundation Sponsored Workshop , 2006, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Interact..

[11]  Eileen Cooper,et al.  A Critique of Six Measures for Assessing Creativity , 1991 .

[12]  A. Cropley.  Creativity and cognition: Producing effective novelty , 1999 .

[13]  M. Boden.  The creative mind : myths & mechanisms , 1991 .

[14]  Takayuki Kanda,et al.  Human creativity can be facilitated through interacting with a social robot , 2016, 2016 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[15]  Patricia Alves-Oliveira,et al.  YOLO, a Robot for Creativity: A Co-Design Study with Children , 2017, IDC.

[16]  Nick Cramer,et al.  Automatic Keyword Extraction from Individual Documents , 2010 .

[17]  M. Runco.  Creativity: Theories and Themes: Research, Development, and Practice , 2006 .

[18]  B. Gaut,et al.  The Philosophy of Creativity , 2010 .

[19]  Brian Scassellati,et al.  The Benefits of Interactions with Physically Present Robots over Video-Displayed Agents , 2011, Int. J. Soc. Robotics.

[20]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Growing Growth Mindset with a Social Robot Peer , 2017, 2017 12th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI.

[21]  E. Paul Torrance,et al.  UNDERSTANDING THE FOURTH GRADE SLUMP IN CREATIVE THINKING. FINAL REPORT. , 1967 .

[22]  Michael D. Mumford,et al.  Something Old, Something New: Revisiting Guilford's Conception of Creative Problem Solving , 2001 .

[23]  I. Carlsson,et al.  The creative process: a functional model based on empirical studies from early childhood to middle age. , 1990, Psychological issues.

[24]  Seymour Papert,et al.  Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas , 1981 .

[25]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot? , 2015, 2015 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[26]  R. Florida.  The Rise of the Creative Class : And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life , 2003 .

[27]  Teresa M. Amabile,et al.  The creative environment scales: Work environment inventory , 1989 .

[28]  E. Torrance.  A Longitudinal Examination of the Fourth Grade Slump in Creativity , 1968 .

[29]  M. Scheerer,et al.  Problem Solving , 1967, Nature.

[30]  Michael A. Wallach,et al.  Modes of thinking in young children: A study of the creativity-intelligence distinction. , 1965 .

[31]  Gerhard Fischer,et al.  Embedding computer-based critics in the contexts of design , 1993, INTERCHI.

[32]  Batya Friedman,et al.  CREATIVITY TASKS AND CODING SYSTEM - USED IN THE PLASMA DISPLAY WINDOW STUDY , 2005 .

[33]  Jacob Cohen.  A Coefficient of Agreement for Nominal Scales , 1960 .

[34]  R. Sternberg,et al.  The Cambridge handbook of creativity. , 2010 .

[35]  L. Witt,et al.  Climate for creative productivity as a predictor of research usefulness and organizational effectiveness in an r&d organization , 1989 .

[36]  I. Carlsson,et al.  Creativity in Middle and Late School Years , 1985 .

[37]  Elena L. Grigorenko,et al.  Guilford's Structure of Intellect Model and Model of Creativity: Contributions and Limitations , 2001 .

[38]  J. Gee,et al.  How Computer Games Help Children Learn , 2006 .

[39]  Matthew Berland,et al.  Forest Friends Demo: A Game-Exhibit to Promote Computer Science Concepts in Informal Spaces , 2017, IDC.