Escape!Bot: Child-Robot Interaction to Promote Creative Expression During Gameplay

Children's creativity plummets as they enter elementary school. Social interactions with peers and playful environments have been shown to foster creativity in children. Digital pedagogical tools often lack the creativity benefits of co-located social interaction with peers. In this work, we leverage a social embodied robot as a playful peer and designed Escape!Bot, a game involving child-robot co-play, where the robot is a social agent that scaffolds for creativity during gameplay. We aim to investigate the factorial extent to which the robot's embodiment (the co-presence of a peer-like social embodied agent), and scaffolding (the expression of creativity scaffolding behaviors by the social agent), influence children's creativity during gameplay. We contribute a novel social robotic interaction paradigm that aims to foster creative expression during gameplay.