Children's Exploration with Social Robots in Digital Art Making

Exploration is an essential way for children to make sense of the world and reflect on self-identity in the view of constructionism. With materials provided by culture and surroundings, children explore and act in the unknowns in order to understand them. Nowadays, the digital age has created a large variety of technical artifacts that children interact with and provided new environments for them to explore and learn.

Existing technologies have been utilized for children’s learning and personal growth. Particularly, artifacts with various levels of anthropomorphism are widely researched in the education domain. On the one end of the spectrum are social robots, which have a higher level of autonomy and more complex underlying mechanisms. They are commonly used as children’s companions and provide social support for learning activities in school or at home. On the other end of the spectrum are animated objects with more abstract shapes and less autonomous behaviors. Many of them are built on the learning theory of constructionism and invented for children's creative activities such as drawing and storytelling.

This thesis is particularly interested in using social robots in the domain of art making. Different from the objects with abstract forms in the prior work, the robot examined here has a more anthropomorphic look and animated behaviors. In comparison with skill development and subject learning that are commonly researched for social robots, this thesis aims to stimulate children's exploration and curiosity in art creation. The hypothesis is that children may act differently with more willingness to explore uncertainties in art with the life endowment for the robot.

Here an augmented system with a social robot is designed and implemented that engages children in digital art making activities. On a projected floor, children interact with a mobile robot Kuri with movements and explore the underlying mechanisms of robot behaviors. Further, the thesis investigates robot social behaviors displayed with its facial expressions, body movements, sound and light, and designs experiments to evaluate their effects on children’s exploration of uncertainties in the interactive process.