Patricia Oliviera [00:00:00]:
The main distinction between just AI and robots, in my perspective, is that robots are embodied. They have a body, an actual physical body that occupies space, that breaks, and that exists where we are under the same laws of gravity.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:20]:
Hello, everyone. My name is Doctor Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:23]:
And my name is Doctor Matthew Werwood.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:25]:
This is the fueling creativity and education podcast.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:29]:
On this show, we’ll be talking about creativity topics and how they apply to the field of education.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:35]:
We’ll be speaking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and digging deeper into new and varying perspectives of creativity, all with the.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:45]:
Goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers and parents with knowledge they can use at home or in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett [00:00:53]:
So let’s begin.

Matthew Worwood [00:00:55]:
So welcome back to our double expresso episode of the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast. And this is the second part of our interview with Patricia Alves Oliveira. Now, in this episode, we’re going to be getting a little bit more into the weeds of robotics and how robotics and future technologies might support creativity in young children.

Cyndi Burnett [00:01:19]:
So, Patricia, can you tell us how you came up with this idea of merging robots and creativity together?

Patricia Oliviera [00:01:26]:
Yes. So, robots, when we hear that word, we kind of think of functional tasks, right? They do have the potential to be very effective in operations that require repetition or even standardization. And I always like to question the status quo of things and to kind of perform research that leaves us feeling a little bit uncomfortable. So one of the things I was asking myself at the time of my PhD was really, what more can robots do for us? And so I chose to focus on one of the most unique and important qualities of being human, which is to be creative. And I started questioning, how can robots influence human creativity? I want to note that I was never interested in creating robots that are creative themselves, but rather to make robots as tools that we can use that would influence our creativity before we get.

Matthew Worwood [00:02:29]:
Too much into the weeds. We’ve spoken a lot around artificial intelligence in the past, and this is kind of the first time we’ve really spoke about robotics. So I understand there’s a relationship artificial intelligence is within the type of robotic work that we’re talking about. But could you separate robotics and artificial intelligence for our listeners?

Patricia Oliviera [00:02:51]:
So I would say that definitely AI is part of robotics. We could say it’s the brain of a robot. It’s what makes the robot do what it does. And the main distinction between just AI and robots, in my perspective, is that robots are embodied. They have a body, an actual physical body that occupies space, that breaks, and that exists where we are under the same laws of gravity. And so that means a lot, because that means the robot can change the world around them, but it also means a lot for how we interact with it compared to an AI that could exist in a computer as a chatbot. Because this embodiment that robots have, their physical presence in the world, the fact that we can touch them or we can be touched by them physically in our skin, it just influences the way we connect with them. So there are a lot of studies that are interested in disambiguating this and understanding if people retain more information when they talk with the robot instead of an AI.

Patricia Oliviera [00:04:08]:
And so there is a lot of influence in our social brain when we interact with a robot compared to when we interact with something that is virtual but still has AI and could even be saying exactly the same thing as the robot is saying. But our social brain, which is kind of like this part of us that is activated when we interact with each other, gets super, super strong when we interact with robots.

Cyndi Burnett [00:04:33]:
So I was going through your website before this interview, and I came across something you worked on called Yolo, which made me smile from ear to ear. So can you explain to our listeners, Yolo and I will put a link to this video inside of our notes.

Patricia Oliviera [00:04:48]:
Yolo is my baby robot. Yeah. So Yolo is a robot that I created during my PhD. It’s a small, twelve centimeter height robot, and it’s supposed to be a tool for children. I would even say that it’s the new generation of a toy for children. And the robot does not have eyes or a mouth, and it has a very abstract shape that is intended, actually, because I prefer to work with non humanoid robots. So robots that don’t really resemble the human shape. And the way that children use this robot is during their storytelling.

Patricia Oliviera [00:05:34]:
So a lot of the things that children do is to just tell stories with the toys they have. So they would use Yolo as a character for the stories that they create, too. And the idea is for the robot, for Yolo to be an animated character in their stories. So Yolo also gives ideas in their story. That makes a huge difference between a traditional toy, such as a teddy bear, to a robot toy, because the teddy bear just does what the child thinks it should do is. And a robot could defy those ideas or could promote some ideas, which makes the story very rich, because children have to combine the ideas they have for the robot with ideas the robot is giving them. And so there is a negotiation process. There is some improvisational process in the story, and maybe the story will be something that the child never imagined it to be.

Patricia Oliviera [00:06:37]:
So they have to go outside of their mind to play with Yolo.

Matthew Worwood [00:06:43]:
And returning back to socio cultural theories, which Cindy and I regularly reference, the interaction between others, I mean, it’s well explored within education research as well, but the importance of having a mentor that you can kind of interact with and engage, you know, in even verbal discussions, that allows you to expand your breadth of knowledge, to reposition your knowledge in response to their feedback. And it’s so exciting to kind of think about a robot companion that can support you in the design and development of a story. And it immediately comes back to one of the things that’s come up in past episodes, and we’ve explored about the future creative, this idea of learning how to collaborate with. With artificial intelligence, but in this case, a physical form of artificial intelligence. And it’s, you know, it’s just mind boggling to think that we’re kind of already beginning to do that at such a young age. Could you speak a little bit to that concept of kind of like, cobots collaborating with machines? And how far away do you think we are from that actually becoming commonplace at home or in the classroom?

Patricia Oliviera [00:07:56]:
The first thing I’d say, and I come from a robotics background, so I mostly have a lot of robotics examples to this. But again, going back to the basic concept of the robot, the robots fail all the time. And that might come as a disappointment for a lot of people, but it’s actually, they are very complex systems, and they need human help to succeed. And so that collaboration, I’d say, comes from a place of need, but also from a place of, I would dare to say, desire. Do we really want a robot that is like doing their own thing super alone and we have no influence on it? Maybe not. We would rather be engaged with it, right. To make it a connection, to make it part of our lives in a more direct way. And so I would say the magic formula is really to blend the needs for robots to do things that they cannot do now because humans are better at, but also to make that as a desirable part of a robot.

Patricia Oliviera [00:09:09]:
I think when we design a system, a machine, we cannot just look at the need. So I need that, right? So I designed a machine for that, but we should design for our desires. How do I really want to interact with that machine? And I think that sometimes it’s forgotten, but I like to bring it in to the context of my work, for example, with Yolo, where I intentionally created robot, the robot YOlo to only be able to give feedback to children if they were also interacting with it. So there is a connection, an interconnection between the two.

Matthew Worwood [00:09:48]:
My mind has just exploded in the past when we’ve spoken about this concept of cobots collaborating with artificial intelligence, collaborating with machines. I’ve always thought about still being a tool to support the creativity of the individual. And I remember in an episode with David Crockley, he said one of the. The things focused around the future creative is trying to identify what machines can do well and what humans can do better. But in your response, I suddenly realized that actually part of the relationship in the future is going to be helping the machines and artificial intelligence and robots to actually also learn what the humans might be able to do better. And it’s kind of crazy right now to think that they’re also utilizing us as a tool so they can be more effective at doing what they need to do as well. I mean that. Cindy, do you want to come in here? Like, am I way off base in being mind boggled here?

Cyndi Burnett [00:10:47]:
No, I’m also mind boggled. My head is spinning. Here’s where my head is spinning. I’m thinking about the connection between the child and the robot, and I’m thinking about, say, something that schools are really struggling with right now, which is mental health. So how could a robot facilitate a child who’s struggling, who’s got anxiety? What are the things they can do to support them? Like, for me right now, it’s sort of my mind is blown because I’m thinking about all the potential opportunities in terms of when an actual physical robot is making a connection with a human. What kind of impact can they have on the individual person? So, yes, I’m thinking both ways, but I’m really thinking about, you know, all of those times when you think, I wish there was another person in the room. Well, what if there’s a robot in the room that’s sort of facilitating something that’s happening in the classroom? So what if, like, a. All right, let’s just imagine possibilities here.

Cyndi Burnett [00:11:43]:
You’ve got a teacher’s aide who is a robot, doing something for you that makes teaching a lot easier to manage, right? So maybe it’s grading papers. Maybe you can assess papers. Maybe it’s sitting with the child and showing them playful ways to add up numbers. Maybe it’s sitting and just listening to a child who’s sort of upset about something and then gives it feedback on what should be done. I mean, it’s all. The possibilities are endless.

Matthew Worwood [00:12:09]:
Well, no, but even going back to our original question is actually the robot sitting down and actually trying to facilitate the creative thinking, which can often come from questioning and challenging and prompting the student to kind of, like, expand their thinking on a particular prompt. So maybe if you want to speak a little bit. I mean, I don’t know, Patricia. We just thrown so much at you. So how about we don’t ask you a question, and we just stay quiet for a few minutes and see how you want to follow up?

Patricia Oliviera [00:12:40]:
So I can speak a little bit about the mental health aspect and how also the Yolo robot was questioning children. So, in terms of Yolo, the way that the robot interacted with children in this storytelling context was the following. So when children play with their toys, they are generally on the floor. They grab the toy, and they move it around. Right. So there is movement, and the toy could be placed in another site, such as, oh, the toy is going to the school. So they place it somewhere else where they think the school is even. That’s, like, part of their imagination.

Patricia Oliviera [00:13:21]:
The concept for Yolo was exactly the same. They were moving it around, and what Yolo was doing was actually to record the movements of being grabbed and dragged somewhere. So, say the child grabs Yolo and moves it around and says, Yolo is going to the school, and puts it in place. Yolo could continue going to the school, so continue the movement that was recorded or could do something completely different, such as run away from that place as fast as a robot could mechanically do in that moment, which is for an outsider perspective, just seemed like the robot is doing a different movement in the mind of the child who is creating the story. This was an interpretation of what the robot wants so they could say things like, oh, someone is in the school that is bullying Yolo, and Yolo is running away because he’s afraid. The story shifts the storyline, different storylines emerge, and that is the part of questioning that Yolo was bringing into the stories. So instead of being a direct verbal question, it was a nonverbal question. It was just moving somewhere else.

Patricia Oliviera [00:14:34]:
And this happens to us all the time. If someone does something and expect to us nonverbally, we also question that. Right. So I wanted to promote this open ended ways that children could interpret the movements of Yolo in their story as a way to critically thinking about their story and therefore fostering their creativity. I don’t know if this was too confusing to convey without the actual robot.

Matthew Worwood [00:14:59]:
No, no, no. And it addresses some of the things that Cindy was talking about in the classroom. How a robot might actually function in the classroom environment, how they might interact with the child in response to an assignment they’ve been given from the teacher. And going back to what I said, it kind of, like, challenges you to really expand your thinking on how robots might actually participate in future learning. You know, I’m sitting here thinking it’s primarily around analyzing data and making better decisions from the data that helps us understand the child. But what you’re doing through your work is talking about how it actually can facilitate and promote creative thinking. And quite often, we do talk about the constraint of time, how difficult it is for teachers, and, to a certain extent, parents, to question and challenge our children during learning experiences in a way that kind of, like, promotes creative thinking within an assignment. So the idea that actually we could have a robot support us in doing that is really exciting.

Matthew Worwood [00:16:01]:
In fact, that’s less mind boggling and just. It’s insightful and incredibly exciting. So thank you so much for sharing that.

Cyndi Burnett [00:16:10]:
So, Patricia, I’d love for you to go back to this mental health piece and how you see robots helping with children and mental health.

Patricia Oliviera [00:16:19]:
Sure. So something I want to start with is I am never trying to create a robot to substitute a psychologist, a mom, a dad, or a teacher that could help with that. With that, all I’m saying is sometimes children need support, and the support system maybe is unavailable. So in those times, what could a robot do? So I am bringing in robots as a new tool for mental health, rather than substituting existing systems and people. And during my postdoc here at the University of Washington, I really went deep into mental health, and I was so happy to do that because that tied back with my undergrad studies in psychology. And what we were trying to do, and this was more on the teenager population, was to bring a robot to school to support. We called it micro interventions. So the robot would deliver micro interventions to children, which are very short interventions that have the potential of an immediate positive outcome.

Patricia Oliviera [00:17:26]:
So what the robot was doing was to just be sitting there, and then teenagers would go to the robot and had the opportunity to either vent out their emotions or engage in a more structured micro intervention delivered by the robot. So those interventions, we did not just create them out of nowhere. We looked at cognitive behavioral therapies, including act and DBT, to make the robot intervene in a more principled way. So we engaged with psychologists to design these interventions with us for the robots. And that is super important because we are talking about the very delicate topic, which is mental health. So when we actually brought in teenagers. To test this idea, we just discovered a whole lot of problems, which is what? I love problems. But they were like, oh, no, if I’m a cool kid, I don’t want to go and talk with a robot about my mental health.

Patricia Oliviera [00:18:24]:
Right? That’s problem number one. This needs to look cool. And so we’re trying to understand where in the school a robot could be so that anyone that goes to the robot goes in a natural way. For example, the robot could be placed near a bathroom or near the cafeteria so that people would know, oh, he went there because he talked to the robot. He’s not feeling good or something. It could be just that he went to grab a croissant. So we were trying to explore context, and that’s actually a big keyword for robotics, which is anything they can do, even if they’re doing at their best. It needs to be context smart.

Patricia Oliviera [00:19:05]:
It needs to be very mindful of how people act and how they already behave in their natural context to succeed. So that was one of the things we did.

Cyndi Burnett [00:19:18]:
It’s interesting because you said that teenagers were worried about talking to robot, but I would think they would be more open because they’re not being judged by anyone. So in terms of an initial assessment of someone’s mental health or just even trying to start having a conversation, talking to a robot might be less. I would think it would be less intimidating because you’re not. No one’s giving you feedback that’s going to make you feel bad or who’s going to judge you or tell your secrets or something like that, you know? So did you find any data that supports the opposite viewpoint?

Patricia Oliviera [00:19:52]:
Absolutely. We discovered a huge potential, especially because teenagers right now, they grew up with technologies all around them. They are so intimately connected to them that literally they are part of their lives and the interactions they have around them with their even friends. So they very easily understood non judgmental space of the robot. They liked it a lot. In the case of our study, we decided not to record what children actually said to the robot because of privacy and ethical purposes. But we did record how long they were talking to the robots. And then we asked them, did you feel the robot was not smart enough when giving you support? Because it was not really understanding every word you said.

Patricia Oliviera [00:20:40]:
And they did not have a problem with that. They liked it because they felt it’s good. It gave me support. I also have to mention, this was a short term study, so maybe if it was a long term study, they would like the robot to know more about them, and that brings other questions into place, but it is working. They do like the robot as a safe space for them, and they also approach this safe space in very different ways. So while boys were going more on their own, girls would go in pairs with their best friends, for example, to talk about an issue they had, and this is how they considered it private. So for them, even going in small group was private, which, again, brings other questions we were not expecting. What does it mean to be private space? What does it mean to, you know, go and talk with a robot alone if that’s not the exact thing that they wanted?

Matthew Worwood [00:21:39]:
You know, what’s also I’m curious about is how this might change over time. I look at the way my young boys interact with virtual assistants, such as Siri and Alexa and Cortana, and they do seem to have a relationship with them. You know, I can tell you that my eldest is very fond of Siri, and if you were to suggest that Alexa is better than Siri, he gets offended, because Siri is the virtual assistant that he’s interacted with for the longest and the most. And it’s curious to me to know how when they become teenagers, you might see a slight change in the comfort of interacting with robots, whereas the current teenagers, I think, wouldn’t have grown up with virtual assistants off the top of my head.

Patricia Oliviera [00:22:29]:
So, absolutely, I think that’s a very interesting point. And going back to education, I feel like we should really have an educational part in schools, which is just dismissifying technology. Right. All about educating. What is Alexa, how does it work? What does it recognize of what you say? How does it bring back to you what they interpreted? And the same with robots, because how can a small child actually distinguish between a robot that is acting so intelligently to them, to maybe a dog or even other people? So I think there needs to be an education about this, because these are different things. A robot is a machine. It’s not living being, at least for me. Some people in other cultures think about this differently, too.

Matthew Worwood [00:23:24]:
Well, listen, I do need to share a story to that, and I don’t want to end the show on a kind of, like, panic note, but my eldest did first go to Siri and ask Siri where babies come from. So he wasn’t satisfied with our first answer, so he went to Siri. So, you know, that, in itself, I think, speaks to what you’re talking about. We are going to have to think about how we, as parents and educators, are going to utilize and interact with robots and determine how they’re going to participate in our children’s learning. I think that’s super important.

Cyndi Burnett [00:24:02]:
Before we head to our last question, I want to tie it back to the first episode we had of our double expresso. And I want to sort of put a ribbon on this. So I want to talk about the future. What type of technological experiences do you see as being the most effective when it comes to promoting creative skills in young children?

Patricia Oliviera [00:24:24]:
Anything that combines this combo of playfulness, engagement and challenge, so challenging a little bit where they are, but also being able to engage them, which with robots, for example, it’s very easy because it’s an interaction that is made right. It’s not a piece of paper where I have an exercise, like, I did my review paper on that, and there was a lot of interventions, just like in a piece of paper, like torrents or others. But a robot can actually interact with you in multiple ways and engage you in that creative process. And then the part of playfulness, just going back to how children normally communicate with the world and how they learn is a lot about play is trial and error, is this mindset of they’re not really judging anything, they are just discovering how things work. And I think a system or a training that promotes this is very important. And then finding ways to be able to analyze all of that complexity and see if it works or not, that is our job to do, but it should not be in the activity so much, to not be so heavily there.

Matthew Worwood [00:25:40]:
So, Patricia, we finish every one of our episodes by asking our guests to provide us with three tips that educators can kind of take away with them. And, you know, sometimes these tips are items that they can immediately act in the classroom or other times, they’re just things to kind of think about and reflect on. So what three tips would you have for educators, particularly in regard to what you’ve shared with us on these double espresso?

Patricia Oliviera [00:26:05]:
So I’d say just triggering your inner child. So making it be an important mindset for you to be playful, to be curious, to explore. Don’t say no. Immediately say no as like maybe the second or third thing you have to say when you interact with a child just for a given time and see what happens, keeping it basic and simple. So I was mentioning before that, you know, sticks and stones can be huge in promoting creativity and triggering imagination. So we don’t need much, we just need maybe the right space and the right time to do things. Focusing more on these processes of what emerges and being open to them and also just not putting everything on you. There are just so many people that children interact with.

Patricia Oliviera [00:27:02]:
There’s their families, even strangers in the street, sometimes even animals, pets, and of course, teachers that can help promote creativity. So I would say really leverage on that connection to the community and to the families to be able to every day do something different with them. I think that’s so important. It’s a game changer.

Cyndi Burnett [00:27:25]:
Well, thank you so much. I know Matt and I are in complete awe of the work that you’re doing, and we hope that you’ll stay in touch and keep us posted on all the exciting things that you’re doing in your work.

Matthew Worwood [00:27:35]:
Patricia so if you’ve enjoyed this double expresso episode, we encourage you to go and share it with a friend, particularly a friend who might be interested in technology or robotics. And don’t forget, if you’ve got any questions about this episode or past or future episodes, you can reach out to Cindy at eye using the email address questionsoueuelingcreativitypodcast.com. My name is Doctor Matthew Werwood, and.

Cyndi Burnett [00:27:59]:
My name is Doctor Cindy Burnett. This podcast was produced by creativity and education and in partnership with dadsforcreativity.com. Our editor is Sina Yusef Sav.