Designing Games for Enabling Co-creation with Social Agents

TL;DR

This paper explores how game-based interactions with a social robot can enhance children's creative expression across verbal, figural, and problem-solving domains, providing design insights for future educational games.

Contribution

It introduces three collaborative games with a social robot aimed at scaffolding different types of creativity in children, with insights on effective game mechanics.

Findings

Children engaged in diverse creative activities with the robot.

Game mechanics effectively stimulated creativity in verbal, figural, and problem-solving tasks.

Design strategies can inform future social agent-based educational games.

Abstract

Digital tools have long been used for supporting children's creativity. Digital games that allow children to create artifacts and express themselves in a playful environment serve as efficient Creativity Support Tools (or CSTs). Creativity is also scaffolded by social interactions with others in their environment. In our work, we explore the use of game-based interactions with a social agent to scaffold children's creative expression as game players. We designed three collaborative games and play-tested with 146 5-10 year old children played with the social robot Jibo, which affords three different kinds of creativity: verbal creativity, figural creativity and divergent thinking during creative problem solving. In this paper, we reflect on game mechanic practices that we incorporated to design for stimulating creativity in children. These strategies may be valuable to game designers and HCI researchers designing games and social agents for supporting children's creativity.