A social robot's influence on children's figural creativity during gameplay

Children's creativity is influenced by their social interactions with co-present peers during collaborative tasks, which digital pedagogical tools lack. Children are known to emulate social agents’ behaviors. In this work, we explore how a social robot's co-presence and creativity demonstration influences children's creative expression during collaborative gameplay. Children played a digital drawing game that afforded figural creativity with a social robot (Jibo) as a peer-like playmate. To understand the effect of the robot's co-presence on children's creativity, we compared the creative expression of participants who played the game with Jibo, and a control group of participants who played in the absence of Jibo. No significant gains in creativity were observed. In a second study, we then enhanced the robot's behavior to express and model figural creativity during gameplay. To understand the effect of the robot's creativity demonstration, we compared the figural creativity of participants’ drawings who played the game with Jibo while it modeled creative behaviors, with participants who played with a version of Jibo that did not. Children expressed significantly higher levels of figural creativity while interacting with the robot that modeled creative behavior through its drawings. We infer that while embodied co-presence was not a significant stimulant of creative expression, creativity demonstration led to heightened figural creativity. We suggest guidelines for designing robotic interactions to foster creative expression in children, highlighting the role of social emulation in influencing behavior.