Fostering children's creativity through LLM-driven storytelling with a social robot.
Maha Elgarf1, Hanan Salam1, Christopher Peters2
1Social Machines and Robotics Lab (SMART), Department of Computer Science, New York University in Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
|December 30, 2024
Summary
Social robots can foster creativity in children. Interactions with creative, autonomous robots significantly boosted children's storytelling creativity, unlike non-creative or less autonomous robot interactions.
Area of Science:
- Child Development
- Human-Robot Interaction
- Artificial Intelligence in Education
Background:
- Creativity declines in children upon school entry due to restricted expression.
- Social robots show potential for enhancing children's educational outcomes.
- Investigating child-robot interaction to stimulate creativity is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explore stimulating children's creativity via child-robot interactions.
- To evaluate the impact of robot behavior (creative vs. non-creative) on children's creativity.
- To compare robot autonomy levels (Wizard of Oz vs. autonomous) in fostering creativity.
Main Methods:
- Fine-tuned a Large Language Model (LLM) for creative and non-creative robot behaviors.
- Conducted two studies with children using social robots in storytelling tasks.
- Assessed creativity using fluency, flexibility, elaboration, and originality metrics.
Main Results:
- No significant effect found when a wizard-controlled robot displayed creative vs. non-creative behavior.
- Children interacting with a creative autonomous robot showed higher fluency, flexibility, and elaboration.
- Autonomous creative robots significantly enhanced children's creativity compared to non-creative autonomous robots.
Conclusions:
- Robot autonomy level significantly impacts children's learning and creativity gains.
- Designing specific robot behaviors is key to maximizing learning in child-robot interactions.
- Creative autonomous social robots show promise for fostering children's creativity in educational settings.
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