Peer Reviewed

This research designs and applies inclusive child-robot interactions for collaborative creativity, where elementary school children and a social robot collaboratively create and publish picture stories. The robot offers creativity scaffolding during parts of the creative process of storytelling through social interactions such as feedback, question asking, divergent thinking, and positive reinforcement. The collaborative tasks and robot interactions are personalized for neurodivergent children's unique needs. Through a five-session user study with 32 children (ages 5–9) over 8 months, we investigate the impact of the social robot on children's exhibited creativity in storytelling over time, their creative interactions with the robot, and their perceptions of the robot as a creative collaborator. Our research revealed that inclusive design practices eliminated creative barriers for children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The robot's creativity scaffolding interactions positively influenced children's verbal creativity in storytelling, and had an influence on their storytelling creative process. After multiple sessions interacting with the robot, we observed the emergence of diverse creator styles among neurodivergent learners. We propose Inclusive Co-creative Child-robot Interaction (ICCRI) guidelines for fostering creativity in children, and accommodating diverse creator styles in complex, open-ended creative tasks.

Through this paper, we present the results of an exploratory study conducted in India and the USA, examining how cultural and academic backgrounds shape children’s perceptions of themselves as design partners in participatory design. We used participatory design methods with two small groups of children from India (n=4) and the USA (n=8) to understand their perspectives and experiences. Our initial findings suggest that personal, familial, and educational experiences play a role in the way children view themselves as designers. We also observed that differences between children from the two countries may result in variations in how they approach participatory design. These initial findings may be taken up by future researchers and designers who aim to support more inclusive participatory design across cultures.

Children’s online co-design has become prevalent since COVID-19. However, related research focuses on insights gained across several shorter-term projects, rather than longitudinal investigations. To explore longitudinal co-design online, we engaged in participatory design with children (ages 8 - 12) for 20 sessions in two years on a single project: an online collaboration platform with tabletop telepresence robots. We found that (1) the online technology space required children to play a role as technology managers and troubleshooters, (2) the home setting shaped online social dynamics, and (3) providing children the ability to choose their design techniques prevented gridlock from situational uncertainties. We discuss how each finding resulted from interplay between our long-term technology design and online co-design processes. We then present insights about the future of online co-design, a conceptual model for longitudinal co-design online, and describe opportunities for further longitudinal online co-design research to generate new methods, techniques, and theories.