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Cubus: Autonomous Embodied Characters to Stimulate Creative Idea Generation in Groups of Children

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Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10498))

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Abstract

Creativity is an ability that is crucial in nowadays societies. It is, therefore, important to develop activities that stimulate creativity at a very young age. It seems, however, that there is a lack of tools to support these activities. In this paper, we introduce Cubus, a tool that uses autonomous synthetic characters to stimulate idea generation in groups of children during a storytelling activity. With Cubus, children can invent a story and use the stop-motion technique to record a movie depicting it. In this paper, we explain Cubus’ system design and architecture and present the evaluation of Cubus’ impact in a creative task. This evaluation investigated idea generation in groups of children during their creative process of storytelling. Results showed that the autonomous behaviors of Cubus’ virtual agents contributed to the generation of more ideas in children, a key dimension of creativity.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. INESC-ID, Av. Professor Cavaco Silva, 2744-016, Porto Salvo, Portugal

    André Pires, Patrícia Alves-Oliveira & Carlos Martinho

  2. Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Av. Professor Cavaco Silva, 2744-016, Porto Salvo, Portugal

    André Pires & Carlos Martinho

  3. Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), CIS-IUL, Av. Das Forças Armadas, 1649-026, Lisboa, Portugal

    Patrícia Alves-Oliveira & Patrícia Arriaga

Authors
  1. André Pires
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  2. Patrícia Alves-Oliveira
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  3. Patrícia Arriaga
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  4. Carlos Martinho
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to André Pires , Patrícia Alves-Oliveira , Patrícia Arriaga or Carlos Martinho .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Jonas Beskow

  2. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Christopher Peters

  3. Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Ginevra Castellano

  4. Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

    Carol O'Sullivan

  5. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Iolanda Leite

  6. University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany

    Stefan Kopp

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Pires, A., Alves-Oliveira, P., Arriaga, P., Martinho, C. (2017). Cubus: Autonomous Embodied Characters to Stimulate Creative Idea Generation in Groups of Children. In: Beskow, J., Peters, C., Castellano, G., O'Sullivan, C., Leite, I., Kopp, S. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10498. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67401-8_46

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67401-8_46

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67400-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67401-8

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