Towards Inclusive Co-Creative Child-Robot Interaction: Can Social Robots Support Neurodivergent Children's Creativity?

This research designs and applies inclusive child-robot interactions for collaborative creativity, where elementary school children and a social robot collaboratively create and publish picture stories. The robot offers creativity scaffolding during parts of the creative process of storytelling through social interactions such as feedback, question asking, divergent thinking, and positive reinforcement. The collaborative tasks and robot interactions are personalized for neurodivergent children's unique needs. Through a five-session user study with 32 children (ages 5-9) over 8 months, we investigate the impact of the social robot on children's exhibited creativity in storytelling over time, their creative interactions with the robot, and their perceptions of the robot as a creative collaborator. Our research revealed that inclusive design practices eliminated creative barriers for children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The robot's creativity scaffolding interactions positively influenced children's verbal creativity in storytelling, and had an influence on their storytelling creative process. After multiple sessions interacting with the robot, we observed the emergence of diverse creator styles among neurodivergent learners. We propose Inclusive Co-creative Child-robot Interaction (ICCRI) guidelines for fostering creativity in children, and accommodating diverse creator styles in complex, open-ended creative tasks.