How screentime could help your child’s creativity

In an era of limitless streaming content, parents rightly worry that screentime is turning children into passive consumers. But screens could actually be used to make children more creative, as work from ETH Zurich demonstrates.

Barely a month goes by without a warning of the effects of screen time on children. But not all screentime seems to be equal. What if the benefits of screens, and their bewitching effect on young people, could be used to enhance traditional creativity? That's the problem that Dr Robert Sumner has been working on with his team at the ETH Zurich Game Technology Center.

They are looking at the potential to create new types of play using augmented reality, which uses the camera and screen of a mobile device to create the illusion of digital objects existing in the physical world.

There needn't be a battle between digital and traditional creativity, argues Dr Sumner. It's understandable that parents worry about their children's screen time, particularly in an era when so much content is available for consumption. There is a risk that digital devices leave children as passive consumers who have lost the habit of playful exploration of their physical environment.

"The real winning proposition here, the real transformative aspect of this technology, is the ability it has to transform creativity," says Dr Sumner. He says that the power of digital processing, combined with the intuitiveness of the real world, leads to an exponential increase in creativity.

This can be seen in the GTC Showcase app, released by the Game Technology Center, which allows children to color a character on a sheet of paper and then see it come to life, complete with their design, on the screen of their tablet or smartphone.

One part of the showcase lets children experiment with music by placing different instrument cards before the camera, while another shows how a museum visit could be made more interactive by allowing children to virtually re-colour paintings.

Dr Sumner's team has been working on augmented creativity since the early part of the 2010s, including work with Disney Research Studios on a coloring book app using Disney characters.

In recent years the concepts have grown more broadly. Pokemon Go, a mobile app that challenged players to find and catch virtual creatures, became a global phenomenon in 2016 and still earned 1.4 Billion US Dollars in 2019. Meanwhile, Apple has made augmented reality a key feature of recent versions of iOS and iPadOS, its mobile operating systems, and emphasises the potential for the technology in productivity, learning and play.

Of course, there is more to the ETH work than simply making games. The team has published numerous scientific articles examining areas of computer science, such as enhancing robot programming with augmented reality or using computers to author interactive narratives. And the research has potential for teaching us more about human behaviour, too.

"When you create a game, you're building an entire world," says Dr Sumner. "By observing how people interact with the game world, and other players, we gain valuable insights about their behaviour in the real world."

Screens are here to stay and our children will be exposed to them even more as they grow up. However, as Dr Sumner's work demonstrates, it is likely that they will be using them more actively, to enhance their work and play, rather than simply sitting passively in front of them.

Further reading:
The Game Technology Center Augmented Creativity page: https://gtc.inf.ethz.ch/publications/augmented-creativity.html
The GTC Showcase App: https://gtc.inf.ethz.ch/publications/gtc-showcase-app.html