Can children learn creativity from a social robot?

Abstract

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.