Designing Child Robot Interaction For Facilitating Creative Learning

Children's creativity - the ability to come up with novel, surprising, and valuable ideas - has been known to contribute to their learning outcomes and personal growth. Standardized ways to measure creativity and divergent thinking reported that as children enter elementary school, their creativity slumps and thinking becomes more convergent, especially around the 4th grade. One cause for this is school curricula become more structured and lose the aspect of creative play. This is especially concerning for kids growing up in the era of Artificial Intelligence, where mechanical and repetitive jobs that require structured thinking move to machines. To be successful in this world of intelligent agents, we must empower children not only to understand how these intelligent agents work, but also to be able to think creatively about generating new artifacts in consort with such agents, which requires imaginative novel thought. In this thesis, I explore whether a social robot's interaction with children can be an effective way to help children think more creatively. I suggest two ways in which robots used as pedagogical tools can help children think more creatively are: 1. through artificial creativity demonstration, such as showing the use of novel ideas, and 2. through offering creativity scaffolding, such as asking reflective questions, validating novel ideas, and engaging in creative conflict. I designed four collaborative game-based activities that involve child-robot interaction and afford different forms of creative expression: 1. Droodle Game, which affords verbal creativity, 2. Magic Draw, which affords figural creativity, 3. WeDo Construction with Jibo, which affords construction creativity and 4. Escape Adventure, which affords divergent thinking and creative problem solving. I designed the behavior of the robot such that it either scaffolds the child for creative thinking, or the robot gives the appearance of creative thinking by artificially emulating human creativity. I evaluated the role of the social robot in influencing children's creativity by running comparative studies between children playing these creativity games while interacting with the robot with creativity-inducing behaviors (creative condition), and without creativity-inducing behaviors (non-creative condition). Children who interacted with the creative robot exhibited higher levels of creativity than children who interacted with a non-creative control robot. I conclude that children can model a social robotic peer's creative expression via social emulation. When scaffolded for creativity, children exhibited higher levels of creativity. This enabled me to develop a robot scaffolding paradigm which fosters creativity in young children. This thesis contributes design guidelines for child-robot interactions which promote creative thinking, and provides evidence that these creativity inducing behaviors exhibited by social robots can foster creativity in young children.

Over the last few years, increasing attention has been focused on the development of children’s acquisition of 21st-century skills and digital competences. Consequently, many education scholars have argued that teaching technology to young children is vital in keeping up with 21st-century employment patterns. Technologies, such as those that involve robotics or coding apps, come at a time when the demand for computing jobs around the globe is at an all-time high while its supply is at an all-time low. There is no doubt that coding with robotics is a wonderful tool for learners of all ages as it provides a catalyst to introduce them to computational thinking, algorithmic thinking, and project management. Additionally, recent studies argue that the use of a developmentally appropriate robotics curriculum can help to change negative stereotypes and ideas children may initially have about technology and engineering. The Handbook of Research on Using Educational Robotics to Facilitate Student Learning is an edited book that advocates for a new approach to computational thinking and computing education with the use of educational robotics and coding apps. The book argues that while learning about computing, young people should also have opportunities to create with computing, which have a direct impact on their lives and their communities. It develops two key dimensions for understanding and developing educational experiences that support students in engaging in computational action: (1) computational identity, which shows the importance of young people’s development of scientific identity for future STEM growth; and (2) digital empowerment to instill the belief that they can put their computational identity into action in authentic and meaningful ways. Covering subthemes including student competency and assessment, programming education, and teacher and mentor development, this book is ideal for teachers, instructional designers, educational technology developers, school administrators, academicians, researchers, and students.

Interaction Design and Children surveys the research on children's cognitive and motor development, safety issues related to technologies and design methodologies and principles. It also provides an overview of current research trends in the field of interaction design and children and identifies challenges for future research.

With an increasing availability, social robots' domains and applications have been expanding, yet the research on human-robot interaction (HRI) still mostly focuses on single person to single robot interactions. Contributing to the field of multi-party HRI in educational domain, this thesis presents a novel parent-child-robot interaction paradigm in the context of shared reading. Constructive parent-child shared reading is crucial in children's early literacy learning, and as a result, we strive to aid children's learning with productive and engaging parent-child-robot triadic reading interactions. The thesis work designs and develops an interactive reading system consisting of a robot facilitator, a storybook tablet app, and a teleoperation controller. Using the implemented reading system, we conduct a pilot Wizard of Oz (WoZ) triadic interaction study with four families, observing and analyzing their triadic interactions in shared reading setting. The pilot study investigates the effects of triadic reading on dyadic reading, and compares the effects of different robot interaction strategies. The study's results suggest that the triadic reading experience generally have a positive influence on families' reading behaviors and their perceptions on social robots, and that each robot strategy has a unique set of effects on the interaction. The thesis work's results, along with its discussions, provide critical insights into parent-child-robot shared reading design considerations

A collection of ten themed activity card sets that introduces children to computer programming fundamentals using Scratch, a visual programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab.

In this book, we have set up a unified analytical framework for various human-robot systems, which involve peer-peer interactions (either space-sharing or time-sharing) or hierarchical interactions. A methodology in designing the robot behavior through control, planning, decision and learning is proposed. In particular, the following topics are discussed in-depth: safety during human-robot interactions, efficiency in real-time robot motion planning, imitation of human behaviors from demonstration, dexterity of robots to adapt to different environments and tasks, cooperation among robots and humans with conflict resolution. These methods are applied in various scenarios, such as human-robot collaborative assembly, robot skill learning from human demonstration, interaction between autonomous and human-driven vehicles, etc. Key Features: Proposes a unified framework to model and analyze human-robot interactions under different modes of interactions. Systematically discusses the control, decision and learning algorithms to enable robots to interact safely with humans in a variety of applications. Presents numerous experimental studies with both industrial collaborative robot arms and autonomous vehicles.

This book offers the first comprehensive yet critical overview of methods used to evaluate interaction between humans and social robots. It reviews commonly used evaluation methods, and shows that they are not always suitable for this purpose. Using representative case studies, the book identifies good and bad practices for evaluating human-robot interactions and proposes new standardized processes as well as recommendations, carefully developed on the basis of intensive discussions between specialists in various HRI-related disciplines, e.g. psychology, ethology, ergonomics, sociology, ethnography, robotics, and computer science. The book is the result of a close, long-standing collaboration between the editors and the invited contributors, including, but not limited to, their inspiring discussions at the workshop on Evaluation Methods Standardization for Human-Robot Interaction (EMSHRI), which have been organized yearly since 2015. By highlighting and weighing good and bad practices in evaluation design for HRI, the book will stimulate the scientific community to search for better solutions, take advantages of interdisciplinary collaborations, and encourage the development of new standards to accommodate the growing presence of robots in the day-to-day and social lives of human beings.

This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings the 7th International Conference on Design, Leaning and Innovation, DLI 2022, which took place in Faro, Portugal, in November 21-22, 2022. The 4 revised full papers and 2 short papers presented were carefully selected from 32 submissions on. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Digital Environments and Design Processes Fostering Learning and Interaction, Designs for Innovative Learning with Digital Technology, Digital Approaches Shaping Educational Practices.