Inspiring social creativity in children with a digital tool

Abstract

Although creativity is an ability that can be developed if trained, most of the systems developed for creativity stimulation focused on individual interventions. This work presents the design, development, and evaluation of CUBUS, a digital tool developed to inspire social creativity in children through storytelling and emotionally expressive characters. Groups of children collaborate with the autonomous virtual characters of the digital tool to create a story together. Our main goal was to conduct an experimental study (n=20) to investigate if the interaction between children and the autonomous emotionally expressive virtual characters present in CUBUS can stimulate social creativity during a storytelling activity. We measured the impact of the digital tool across several creativity domains: pre-and post-testing (questionnaire assessment), the creative process of children (behavior analysis), and the story created (creative outcome). Results showed that although children generated fewer storytelling ideas using CUBUS, these ideas were deemed more original.