The Social Construction of Creativity in Educational Robotics

One of the main benefits of educational robotics is its potential to inspire curiosity and creativity in students. Creativity in educational robotics has been typically associated with the constructionist learning paradigm and the processes of building, programming and manipulating task-centric robotic platforms. On the other hand, there has been a growing tendency recently to use anthropomorphic social robots in education that act not only as tools but also as peers and teaching assistants. Since the role of anthropomorphic social robots is to engage as social actors, designing and manipulating robots as a form of creation is no longer a goal for educational robotics. This paper argues that a new form of creativity concerns the meanings students make of anthropomorphic robots in the course of human-robot social interaction. This is based on the following assumptions: creativity is socially constructed and the main reason for students to be interested in robotics is a fascination with the illusion of life. In particular, this paper proposes to encourage the ability to create meanings through exploration of a mismatch between humanlike robot design and the human frame of reference.