  Digital tools have long been used for supporting children's creativity.
Digital games that allow children to create artifacts and express themselves in
a playful environment serve as efficient Creativity Support Tools (or CSTs).
Creativity is also scaffolded by social interactions with others in their
environment. In our work, we explore the use of game-based interactions with a
social agent to scaffold children's creative expression as game players. We
designed three collaborative games and play-tested with 146 5-10 year old
children played with the social robot Jibo, which affords three different kinds
of creativity: verbal creativity, figural creativity and divergent thinking
during creative problem solving. In this paper, we reflect on game mechanic
practices that we incorporated to design for stimulating creativity in
children. These strategies may be valuable to game designers and HCI
researchers designing games and social agents for supporting children's
creativity.
