Hello.
My name is Patrícia and I will be presenting the paper “Creativity Encounters Between
Children and Robots”.
This work was performed alongside my supervisors Patrícia Arriaga and Ana Paiva and in collaboration
with Matt Cronin.
This work is part of my phd project.
Creativity is characterized to be at the heart of what it means to be human.
Creativity is a skill related with a sense of wonder, self-expression, and identity.
It is also related with new forms of learning and problem solving, being an important transferable
skill.
Creativity contributes to moods of joy, pleasure, excitement, and efficiency in personal and
professional lives.
Most importantly, creativity is a protective skills, with benefits in different areas of
human development, growth, and wellbeing.
But our creativity levels are dynamic and likely to change throughout our life.
The first major oscillation in creative abilities occurs at the age of 7 years old.
At this age, an intense decrease in creativity levels occurs and this phenomenon is called
the “creativity crisis”.
There are several reasons associated with this major decrease, such as the formal and
traditional education that values standardized knowledge over creative problem solving or
divergent thinking.
There is also conformity behaviors towards peers,
biological changes,
and even economic factors that restrict or foster access to stimuli.
The good news is that creativity is a skill that can be developed if trained.
However, existing creativity training programs for children are rare and the existing ones
resemble test-like formats, lacking elements of joy and play, essential to children’s
engagement.
Given the willingness and benefits of children interacting with technology, we aim to test
the impact of a social robot on children’s creativity levels.
And for this we have used the YOLO robot.
YOLO is a small sized robot, with about 10cm that children can easily gab and go during
play.
Children interact with YOLO using touch, movement and lights.
Let me show you an interaction.
Children grab YOLO as a toy and a character in the stories.
And they create stories around the robot using the robot as a character.
To study YOLO, we developed three study conditions.
In the first study condition,YOLO exhibited two creativity techniques.
The first creativity technique is called mirroring, in which the robot mimics the same play movement
that children performed.
In the second creativity technique, is called contrasting, in which the robot performs a
different play movement compared to what children did.
We called this the “simple condition”.
Let me show you in a video.
Based on creativity research the robot used two techniques to stimulate creativity.
When using the contrast technique, YOLO gives opposite ideas.
This stimulates divergent thinking.
When using the mirroring technique, YOLO elaborates on the same idea, stimulating convergent thinking.
In the second study condition, YOLO exhibited two creativity techniques plus social behaviors,
such as pro-active behaviors.
We called this the “enhanced condition”.
The third condition is our “control”, so YOLO was basically turned off.
The goal of this study was to understand and investigate if YOLO can be a tool to increase
creativity levels during play.
We has 62 children between 7-9 years old,
and we performed this study in summer camps.
The first step was to welcome children.
Secondly, the researcher number 1 applied the questionnaire to children.
Then, the researcher number 2 comes and introduces YOLO
and children can explore what to do with the robot.
And then, the storytelling activity starts
Then, the first researcher applies the questionnaires.
We have used two researchers to administer the procedure to control for experimenter
bias.
We have measured creativity taking into account pre and posttesting
so the traditional form of measurement.
And also the creative process in which we performed behavioral analysis of the stories
that children created with YOLO.
The behavioral analysis was comprised of fluency, so if children performed few ideas for the
story
or many ideas.
We also analyzed for flexibility,
so how different the categories of ideas are..
And elaboration, so how deep do the children go into their ideas.
We also saw how original they are,
so how rare and novel the ideas are.
The creative process is messy but very rich because it when we allow behaviors of exploration
.
We hypothesize that the creativity will be higher in the simple and enhanced conditions
compared to the control condition in terms of the creative person,
so pre-post testing,
but also in terms of the creative process of children.
Our results show that there is an increase in the creativity levels from the pre test
to the post test and this increase occurs in all study conditions.
In terms of fluency we had no differences between conditions.
Children emerged with the same number of ideas in the study conditions.
But we had a result in terms of flexibility in which more ideas for the characters were
emerging between the Enhanced and the Control conditions.
Elaboration also provided significant results and children elaborated more on ideas related
with the story actions.
So despite more different ideas being generated for the characters, as we saw in the flexibility,
children elaborated more on ideas related with actions.
In terms of the originality we could see that the more original ideas are present in the
Simple condition.
This means that in this conditions the stories that children created were more rare and with
novel content.
Its seems that having a robot with only behaviors to stimulate creativity can have a stronger
effect on the creativity of children.
We also used responsible research guidelines.
We pre-registered our study and all the materials we used are available in open-access.
The take-home message is basically that we tested a fully autonomous robot to increase
creativity in children.
Our results show that no differences in creative abilities are encountered between the conditions.
But when we look at the creative process we can see that children provided richer ideas
when they are playing with a robot that also displays creativity techniques.
Thank you so much for listening.
I am happy to receive any questions, comments or feedback via email.