Educational Robotics and Robot Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

There is a growing literature concerning robotics and creativity. Although some authors claim that robotics in classrooms may be a promising new tool to address the creativity crisis in school, we often face a lack of theoretical development of the concept of creativity and the mechanisms involved. In this article, we will first provide an overview of existing research using educational robotics to foster creativity. We show that in this line of work the exact mechanisms promoted by robotics activities are rarely discussed. We use a confluence model of creativity to account for the positive effect of designing and coding robots on students' creative output. We focus on the cognitive components of the process of constructing and programming robots within the context of existing models of creative cognition. We address as well the question of the role of meta-reasoning and emergent strategies in the creative process. Then, in the second part of the article, we discuss how the notion of creativity applies to robots themselves in terms of the creative processes that can be embodied in these artificial agents. Ultimately, we argue that considering how robots and humans deal with novelty and solve open-ended tasks could help us to understand better some aspects of the essence of creativity.