Designing Toys That Come Alive: Curious Robots for Creative Play

  • Authors:
  • Kathryn Merrick

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Information Technologies and Electrical Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra ACT, 2612

  • Venue:
  • ICEC '08 Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Entertainment Computing
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Creative thinking requires imagination, creativity, play, sharing and reflection. This paper presents an architecture for a curious, reconfigurable robot that encourages creative design thinking by permitting designed structures to learn behaviours. These behaviours encourage designers to play with different structures, reflect on the relationship between structure and behaviour and imagine new structures. A demonstration of the architecture is described using the Lego Mindstorms platform. The demonstration shows how a curious robot can adapt new behaviours in response to changes in its structure, and how this can encourage the creative thinking spiral and creative design.