Hi everyone.
My name is Layne Jackson Hubbard.
And today, let’s talk about young children and creative play
and how we can support reflective storytelling
through child-robot interaction.
Reflection is transformative.
When we reflect,
we examine a situation, combine information,
and transform our understanding.
And reflection is critical to creative invention,
design expertise, constructionist learning,
and even cognitive development.
In early childhood,
there are many materials to support creative play
but what toys or tools support reflection?
In this study, we develop a toy robot
to scaffold reflective storytelling
within creative play,
then examine the ways that children
reflect with the robot.
We had 6 design goals to guide our interaction design.
Integrate into real world contexts
and diverse creative play,
support personally meaningful reflection
through scaffolded storytelling,
and foster iterative creating and storytelling,
and playful child-centerness.
Our interaction design is based on my work
as a preschool teacher,
and our visits to preschools and homes
to understand storytelling in early childhood.
To guide children in reflective storytelling,
we developed an interactive robotic object.
A phone running our voice application
is inserted into a stuffed animal.
The stuffed animal robot asks children questions
to help them tell stories.
To adapt for COVID-19 safety,
we used a Wizard-of-Oz method.
In their own homes,
children chose one of their stuffed animals
to act as the robot.
They placed their stuffed animal
on top of their phone,
and we remotely operated the
robot’s voice through the phone.
The robot uses open-ended questions
to scaffold the children’s storytelling,
such as: "What did you make?"
"Tell me a story."
"What happened next?"
"Why?"
In this study, we ask:
What are young children’s approaches
to reflective storytelling with a robot?
We recruited 33 children
ages 4 and 5 years old
from 22 cities and towns in 10 U.S. states.
There are 3 stages to this study:
Activity setup, creative activity,
and storytelling activity with a robot.
In the setup,
we asked parents to gather creative supplies
and arrange them for the children's play.
We also asked children
to choose a stuffed animal
to help them tell a story.
Then, children had 5 minutes to create freely.
They could work alone
or together with their parents or siblings.
Finally, children co-located their stuffed animal
with their parent’s phone
to start the child-robot interaction.
The robot asked the children questions
to help them tell a story about their creation.
In our data analysis,
we transcribed the child-robot interactions
then used qualitative affinity diagramming
and thematic analysis techniques
to discover themes from the data.
We discovered four approaches that
children use in reflective storytelling with a robot:
Imaginative, narrative recall,
process oriented, and descriptive labeling.
In the imaginative approach,
children imagined characters and events.
This child talked to their stuffed animal to tell a story
about traveling through space and visiting planets.
The imaginative approach also led to iterative play.
This child used tiles to build a 3-dimensional creation,
then talked with their stuffed animal.
This led to a new creation and a new story.
In the narrative recall approach,
children told stories about their own personal experiences.
Children told stories about birthdays, families,
and even told stories about funerals and death.
Many children also told stories about conflicts at school.
The emotional content in narrative recall stories help us
to consider ways to support young children’s social and emotional skills.
In the process oriented approach,
children described the sequence
of how they made their creation,
and the challenges they had.
These reflections led to design iteration.
The process-oriented approach also led to narrative recall.
Here, a child described their process of drawing their family,
then began sharing memories about their family too.
In the descriptive labeling approach,
children described the elements of their creation.
"So i have a one under one dot."
"And a two under two dots."
The descriptive labeling approach also led to iteration.
This child described their forest,
then decided to make a city next.
Across these approaches to reflection,
we noticed how children started with one approach,
then used other approaches
after repeated robot prompting.
Our design strategies supported children
in flexibly responding to the robot’s prompts
in personally meaningful ways.
And, we encourage interaction designers
to explore these design goals in their own work,
and to consider ways to support children
in their differing approaches.
We're so grateful to share our work with you!
Please visit our project page at MindScribe.org
or connect with us on Twitter.
Thank you!