Hi everyone! my name is Maha Elgarf. Today, on behalf of our colleagues
Patricia Alves-Oliveira, Giulia Perugia, Ginevra Castellano, Christopher Peters and Ana Paiva,
My Co-author Natalia Calvo-Barajas and I,
are going to present our full paper entitle "And then what happens?" Promoting Children's Verbal Creativity
Using a Robot.
This work is part of ANIMATAS, a Horizon 2020
2020 Marie Curie project funded by the EU.
As the world is shifting from industrial to creative economies,
creativity is becoming a vital skill for an Innovative working environment.
According to previous research: first, creativity can be nurtured and nourished throughout life.
And second, a creativity crisis occurs as children move from kinder garten to elementary school.
Children's creative abilities are known to plunge at that age because of the structure of current educational system
that constraints children's expressivity and encourages
them to conform to societal norms.
Lately, researchers in human-robot interaction have attributed great attention
to the use of social robots in order to develop children's creativity
since a very young age.
Also according to previous research, there is an established
link between creativity
and the Regulatory Focus Theory known as RFT. RFT suggests that people follow one of two motivational approaches in order
to achieve a goal.
Either a promotion focused approach where people are motivated
to achieve, a goal by reward receipt.
And thus, this Paradigm is associated with feelings of happiness
and excitement.
Or a prevention focused paradigm where people
are motivated to achieve a goal by threat avoidance. And, thus
this paradigm is associated with feelings of fear and anxiety.
Research literature suggests that positive emotions result
in higher creativity and consequently, a promotion focused paradigm
has a positive impact on creativity measures.
In our study, we developed a collaborative game between the child
and the social Robot Emys.
To induce regulatory focus emotional states,
we created two versions of the game as a priming activity.
In this activity, children were asked to imagine themselves locked in a spaceship in planet Mars.
Their goal was to find the key to get out of the spaceship.
The graphical interface and robot's behaviors were designed according to the experimental condition.
In the promotion condition, we implemented verbal and non-verbal behaviors to suggest happiness and excitement.
Also, children were promised a gift as soon as they managed to get out of the spaceship.
In the prevention condition, children were told that they needed to find the key
to escape from the spaceship before an explosion.
The graphical interface and robot's behaviors were designed to suggest fear and anxiety.
To investigate children's verbal creativity, we designed an interactive storytelling game.
This activity took place before and after the priming also called pre-and post-test.
Children were asked to tell a story to the robot
by using a graphical interface that had different scenarios and characters
to avoid repetitions or story recall in the post-test.
The robot's behaviors were implemented through the verbal channel only.
And these behaviors provided guidance and support.
Due to the challenges in speech recognition for children, we tele-operated the robot's behaviors.
The aim of our research was to investigate the effects of Regulatory
Focus Theory on children's creative processes.
Therefore, our first question was focused on understanding how a promotion
and a prevention regulatory focus affect children's creativity when creating
a story with a robot.
To answer this question, we evaluated children's verbal creativity
before and after the priming.
As we saw before, positive emotions are known to lead to higher creativity.
Therefore, we hypothesized that, children in the promotion condition
will perform better in verbal creativity than those in the prevention condition.
Secondly, to investigate the type of robot's behaviors that were more effective
at stimulating children's verbal creativity, we proposed our second research question
that aims at understanding how does the robot verbal behaviors influence children's ideas during story creation.
According to the literature, feelings of confidence can stimulate creativity.
Therefore, we hypothesized that children's creativity levels increase
when the robot asked questions or shows encouragement.
To address of our research questions, we conducted
a user study with 69 children between 7 and 9 years old
recruited from 2 international schools in Lisbon, Portugal.
We randomly assigned participants to one of the study conditions.
Some participants were excluded due to different reasons such as
speaking in another language different than English.
We analyzed data from 32 children in the promotion focus condition
and 29 children in the prevention focus condition.
The creative process was measured in terms of: fluency, that is the total
number of story elements expressed verbally by the child.
Flexibility: that is the frequency of the child ideas belonging to different categories.
Elaboration: that is the length of the story considering the time of the first and last story element.
And finally, originality that is the level of originality of the idea on a scale from 1 to 3.
We designed a coding scheme based on these four variables. Then, we coded the creative process using the Elan software.
To measure the effect of robot's verbal behavior, we designed
a coding scheme to categorize the different robot's utterances and
measure their effect on originality level.
We assessed whether children's originality increase, decrease or remain
constant after the behavior of the robot had emerged.
So for the first research question, we found that children exhibited
higher fluency in the promotion condition in the post-test
than in the pre-test.
An effect that was not observed in the prevention condition.
We also found out that children expressed significantly higher
average originality in the post-test than in the pre-test in
the promotion condition. But surprisingly, they used a higher
frequency of the highest originality - which is originality level
3- in the post-test than in the pre-test, but in the prevention condition.
For the flexibility, children significantly used
higher frequency of characters and actions in the post-test
than in the pre-test in both promotion and prevention conditions.
We observed no significant effect on the elaboration measure.
For the second research question,
this video shows an example of the effect of the robot's verbal behavior.
Here, it was an encouragement from the robot that resulted in a decrease
in the originality of the child's ideas.
To wrap up, we developed an interactive storytelling activity.
with a social robot based on regulatory focus motivational
strategies (promotion and prevention).
We tested our design in an educational environment for the first
time in cHRI.
As the results have shown, the first hypothesis that we discussed
was partially supported since children assigned to the promotion
condition have portrayed higher creativity, but only in terms
of fluency and average originality of ideas. For the flexibility
measure, as explained children used higher frequency of characters
and actions in the post-test than in the pre-test independent of the
priming condition, which highlights the potential of a collaborative
interactive game between the robot and the child on the flexibility
measure of creativity, independent of the regulatory focus strategy.
Results have also shown that the second hypothesis
was not supported since mostly, there was no change of originality
as a response to the robot's behaviors.
And whenever there was a change, the robot's behaviors tended
to decrease the originality rather than increase it, as it was clear
on the video shown previously.
We attribute that to evidence presented by previous research
that suggests that children
either prefer robot companions that will not interrupt them at all,
but rather act as listener companions. Or robots who would use
more personalized and contextual feedback. So instead of a random
question "Why?" that we used frequently in this study, the robot would say
something like "Why did the prince jump in the water at night?"
Thank you so much for listening.
Please feel free to get in touch in case you have any questions.