Escape!Bot: Social Robots as Creative Problem-Solving Partners

Safinah Ali, Nisha Elizabeth Devasia, Cynthia Breazeal

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

In this work, we explore the effect of a social robot's embodiment and creativity scaffolding on children's creative problem solving skills in the context of a digital creative problem-solving game called Escape!Bot. Children aged 5-11 years played the video game, which involved assembling contraptions to escape a digital world, and the robot Jibo acted as a collaborative peer that offered questions, reflective prompts, challenges, and ideas. In order to evaluate the role of the robot's co-presence and creativity scaffolding, we ran a 2x2 experiment to determine the factorial efficacy of the robot's embodiment and creativity scaffolding behaviors. We observed mixed results, with the robot's creativity scaffolding having a positive influence on the time taken to complete the game, but not on the overall use of novel objects or reuse of objects. We present the system design, user study and findings from Escape!Bot to investigate the feasibility of designing social robots to support creative problem solving.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationC and C 2022 - Proceedings of the 14th Creativity and Cognition 2022
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages275-283
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781450393270
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 20 2022
Event14th ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference, C and C 2022 - Venice, Italy
Duration: Jun 20 2022Jun 23 2022

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Conference

Conference14th ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference, C and C 2022
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityVenice
Period6/20/226/23/22

Keywords

  • child-robot interaction
  • collaboration
  • creativity
  • divergent thinking
  • social robots

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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