Event Information
Creativity in children develops most strongly in environments that blend open-ended problem solving, narrative construction, and collaborative exploration. Research consistently shows that engaging children in robotics activities, such as designing, building, and programming robots enhances imagination, idea generation, and problem-solving, leading to measurable improvements in fluency, flexibility, and originality (Nemiro et al., 2017; Noh & Lee, 2019; Granichina et al., 2024; Fakaruddin et al., 2023). Educational robotics is also associated with increased creative self-efficacy and the development of innovative outcomes (Liu et al., 2023; Granichina et al., 2024). Storytelling, particularly when it involves collaboration and interaction, has likewise been recognized as a powerful avenue for nurturing creativity. Developing and performing stories encourages children to imagine alternatives, generate original ideas, and elaborate on narratives, skills central to Torrance’s (1974) model of creativity: fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration (Ryokai et al., 2009).
The theoretical grounding for this study draws on constructionist learning theory (Papert, 1980), sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978), and Torrance’s theory of divergent thinking (1974). Together, these perspectives frame creativity as both a cognitive process of generating and elaborating ideas and a socially mediated, hands-on practice that develops through collaboration and shared creation. Within this framework, robotics functions as a constructionist medium through which learners externalize and test their ideas, while storytelling provides the sociocultural space where children collaboratively build narratives, negotiate meaning, and express imagination through collective story development. This integration positions robotics-enhanced storytelling as a dynamic environment where cognitive, social, and material dimensions of creativity intersect.
Recent research suggests that combining robotics with storytelling is particularly effective for fostering creativity. Activities where children use robots as story characters, or program them to enact narratives, have demonstrated significant gains compared to traditional or single-modality approaches (Stork, 2020; An & Nam, 2024; Palioura et al., 2024). Storytelling provides narrative structure and imaginative context, while robotics, grounded in constructionist learning theory, enables hands-on experimentation, iteration, and design. Together, these activities create multisensory, embodied learning experiences that promote creative growth (Kushner et al., 2024; Bravo et al., 2021).
Despite promising findings, scoping reviews indicate that most existing research has focused on early childhood and emphasized qualitative outcomes. Few studies have provided quantitative evidence on how robotics-enhanced storytelling influences creativity in older children (Palioura et al., 2024). To address this gap, the present study examines how a one-week robotics-enhanced storytelling program using VEX GO kits affects creativity among 19 children aged 7–9. By engaging learners in designing and incorporating robots as story characters, this study seeks to generate quantitative evidence of creative growth and offer new insights into how narrative and hands-on design experiences foster creativity.
A mixed-methods approach was used to explore how robotics-enhanced storytelling influences children’s creativity.
RQ1. Do children show significant gains in overall creativity scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking – Figural (TTCT-F) after participating in robotics-enhanced storytelling activities?
RQ2. Which TTCT-F creativity dimensions – fluency, originality, elaboration, or resistance to premature closure – show the greatest improvement following robotics-enhanced storytelling activities?
RQ3: Is there an association between children’s cognitive creativity, as measured by the TTCT-F, and their context-specific creative performance in robotics-enhanced storytelling, as measured by the Robotics-Enhanced Storytelling Creativity Rubric?
To analyze these questions, the study employed both quantitative and qualitative methods to capture changes in children’s creativity.
Quantitative Data: To assess divergent thinking, children completed the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking – Figural Form A (TTCT-F) as both a pre-test and post-test. The TTCT-F provides standardized scores across multiple dimensions of creative thinking, including fluency (number of ideas), flexibility (variety of ideas), originality (novelty of ideas), elaboration (level of detail), and resistance to premature closure (openness and flexibility in thinking). In addition, a Robotics-Enhanced Storytelling Creativity Rubric was used to evaluate creativity expressed within the intervention context. Adapted from Blake-West, Alrawashdeh, and Bers (2024), the rubric emphasizes narrative and performance dimensions over code-centric features. It includes four dimensions: Robot Coordination (timing and logic of movements within the story), Visual Customization (symbolic transformation of robots into characters or props), Narrative Structure (presence of story grammar elements such as characters, setting, goal, conflict, and resolution), and Narrative Coherence (logical and causal connections among story events and robot actions). Each dimension was scored on a 0 –3 scale, with higher scores reflecting greater creative integration.
Qualitative Data: Data analysis focused on identifying changes in narrative complexity, symbolic expression, and collaboration between the pre-camp and post-camp stories. Each story was examined for evidence of growth across the four rubric dimensions – Robot Coordination, Visual Customization, Narrative Structure, and Narrative Coherence. Patterns were coded to capture improvements in how children used robots as expressive agents, integrated story elements, and worked collaboratively to refine their ideas. Observation notes were thematically analyzed to identify recurrent behaviors and interactions indicative of creative engagement, such as collective brainstorming, experimentation with robot movements, and iterative story revisions. The findings from these qualitative analyses were compared with rubric scores to highlight emerging patterns of creative development across both individual and group levels.
Together, these data sources offered complementary perspectives on children’s creativity. The TTCT-F provided a standardized, cognitive measure of divergent thinking, capturing general creative abilities such as idea fluency, originality, and elaboration. In contrast, the Robotics-Enhanced Storytelling Creativity Rubric was applied to analyze pre- and post-camp stories, capturing applied and collaborative dimensions of creativity expressed through children’s story performances, how they coordinated robot movements, customized visual designs, and structured coherent narratives. Using both tools allowed the study to examine creativity as both a mental process and a situated performance, revealing not only whether creativity increased but also how it was expressed through the evolution of students’ stories.
Preliminary analysis of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking – Figural (TTCT-F) by age group revealed measurable creative growth following the robotics-enhanced storytelling activities.
Fluency showed a large and statistically significant increase, reflecting improved idea generation (Δ = +14.32, p = 0.001).
Elaboration demonstrated a substantial and significant gain, indicating greater detail and depth in creative expression (Δ = +10.68, p < 0.001).
Originality showed a small, non-significant increase in novel idea generation (Δ = +3.74, p = 0.45).
Abstractness of Titles exhibited a minor, non-significant decline, suggesting slightly reduced ability to synthesize and express conceptual insight (Δ = –4.84, p = 0.32).
Resistance to Premature Closure (Closure) revealed a statistically significant decrease, indicating reduced ability to maintain openness before finalizing ideas (Δ = –10.47, p = 0.01).
Creativity Index displayed a moderate, nearly significant overall improvement in total creative performance (Δ = +3.79, p = 0.052).
Creativity Strength showed a small, non-significant increase, reflecting modest gains in the consistency and intensity of creative output (Δ = +0.95, p = 0.18).
Overall, the TTCT-F results indicate significant gains in Fluency and Elaboration, modest increases in Originality, and a significant decline in Closure. The Creativity Index and Creativity Strength improved slightly but did not reach conventional significance levels. These findings suggest that robotics-enhanced storytelling effectively fostered children’s ability to generate and elaborate on ideas, key indicators of divergent thinking, while their capacity to sustain openness and resist premature closure may require additional instructional scaffolding to develop more fully.
Preliminary analysis of students’ pre-camp and post-camp stories revealed clear qualitative differences in how creativity was expressed through robotics-enhanced storytelling. The pre-camp stories were generally short, loosely structured, and descriptive rather than narrative. Most lacked defined characters, coherent plotlines, or purposeful robot movement. Robots were often introduced as mechanical objects rather than symbolic characters, and story events tended to unfold sequentially without clear cause-and-effect relationships.
By contrast, the post-camp stories, evaluated using the Robotics-Enhanced Storytelling Creativity Rubric, showed notable development across all four rubric dimensions. Students demonstrated greater robot coordination, synchronizing robot movements with dialogue or story events; stronger visual customization, using props and decorations to transform robots into recognizable characters; and improved narrative structure, with identifiable beginnings, conflicts, and resolutions. Narrative coherence also increased, as storylines flowed more logically and robot actions reflected emotional or thematic intent.
Although these findings are preliminary, they suggest that participation in the robotics-enhanced storytelling camp helped children move from basic, unstructured storytelling toward intentional, narratively organized, and symbolically expressive creative work. The growth observed across the rubric dimensions complements the TTCT-F results, indicating that gains in cognitive creativity were accompanied by advances in applied, collaborative creativity within the storytelling performances.
Scientifically, it contributes to the growing body of literature on creativity by providing quantitative evidence of the impact of robotics-enhanced storytelling on divergent thinking in children. By integrating Torrance’s creativity framework with constructionist learning theory, the study demonstrates how creativity can be measured not only as a cognitive trait but also as an embodied, contextualized practice within robotics and storytelling activities.
From an educational perspective, the findings offer valuable insights for curriculum design and classroom practice. The significant gains in creativity dimensions such as fluency and elaboration suggest that robotics-enhanced storytelling can be an effective pedagogical approach for fostering creative problem-solving, narrative skills, and collaborative learning. The rubric-based analysis provides teachers with a practical tool to evaluate creativity in authentic classroom activities, moving beyond abstract test scores to observable student performances.
Its contributions extend to researchers seeking to validate creativity interventions, as well as educators aiming to design learning environments where imagination, collaboration, and problem-solving are central to student growth.
Blake-West, J., Alrawashdeh, G., & Bers, M. (Sept, 2024). Validating a Creative Coding Rubric through expressive activities for elementary grades. Journal of Research on Technology in Education.
Bravo, F., Hurtado, J., & González, E. (2021). Using Robots with Storytelling and Drama Activities in Science Education. Education Sciences. https://doi.org/10.3390/EDUCSCI11070329
Fakaruddin, F., Shahali, E., & Saat, R. (2023). Creative thinking patterns in primary school students’ hands-on science activities involving robotic as learning tools. Asia Pacific Education Review, 25, 171-186. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-023-09825-5
Granichina, O., Sergeev, S., Аmelin, K., & Granichina, A. (2024). Robotics in the development of general creative abilities of younger schoolchildren. Robotics and Technical Cybernetics. https://doi.org/10.31776/rtcj.12101
Kushner, S., Kanji, J., Dietz, P., & Wigdor, D. (2024). Papertronic Puppets: Teaching STEM and Storytelling Through Creative Construction. 2024 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE61694.2024.10892876
Liu, X., Gu, J., & Zhao, L. (2023). Promoting Primary School Students’ Creativity via Reverse Engineering Pedagogy in Robotics Education. Thinking Skills and Creativity. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2023.101339
Nemiro, J., Larriva, C., & Jawaharlal, M. (2017). Developing Creative Behavior in Elementary School Students with Robotics. Journal of Creative Behavior, 51, 70-90. https://doi.org/10.1002/JOCB.87
Noh, J., & Lee, J. (2019). Effects of robotics programming on the computational thinking and creativity of elementary school students. Educational Technology Research and Development, 68, 463 - 484. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-019-09708-w
Ryokai, K., Lee, M., & Breitbart, J. (2009). Children's storytelling and programming with robotic characters. **, 19-28. https://doi.org/10.1145/1640233.1640240
Stork, M. (2020). Supporting Twenty-First Century Competencies Using Robots and Digital Storytelling. Journal of Formative Design in Learning, 4, 43 - 50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41686-019-00039-w
Torrance, E. P. (1974). Torrance tests of creative thinking. Bensenville, IL: Scholastic Testing Service.
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