Abstract
Creativity is known as an ability that can be developed and improved. Since creative abilities are desired in most modern societies, it becomes important to develop activities that stimulate creativity at a very young age. It seems, however, there is a lack of tools to support creative activities for children. We present 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 create a movie depicting it. This work yielded a useful methodology that we consider can aid the design of tools which assist users in their task. This methodology consists in an iterative development where several user studies are carried out to inform and validate design choices during a tool's different development stages. Additionally, a methodology to evaluate the different aspects of creativity is also presented and implemented during our creativity evaluation with Cubus. To evaluate how Cubus supports creativity, we investigated the number of ideas generated by groups of children during their creative process of creating and recording a story and the creativity of the product this process originated, a stop-motion movie. Results showed that the embodied synthetic characters with autonomous behavior of Cubus contributed to the generation of more ideas in children, a key aspect of creativity. Regarding the creative product, results suggest that Cubus agents' autonomous behaviors were unable to influence children's creative products, the stop-motion movies.