Playful Modular Robotics Among Children in Kyiv Under Condition of War and Ukrainian Refugees

Wartime is a highly stressful situation. In the context of the war in Ukraine, the chronic stress experienced by children could hinder the learning process but also creativity, which the emotional state of the learner-player can impact. In this study, we evaluated how stressful situations such as war conditions can impact divergent thinking (DT) in creative problem solving (CPS). Different educational contexts support CPS with activities that require learners to engage in creative problem-solving. In e-learning, CPS is expected to support the development of higher-order thinking skills (Setyosari, Kuswandi & Ulfa, 2023) but can be impacted by contextual factors such as chronic stress (Kassymova et al., 2019). This study aims to evaluate a CPS task in the context of the chronic stress of Kyiv learners but also the stress endured by Ukrainian refugees abroad. For this objective, we study three aspects of DT: fluency, flexibility, and originality. We did this by giving Ukrainian participants a CPS robotic task that made them think of ways to come up with new ideas while they were living in France as refugees during a war. We aim to identify how stressful situations affect divergent thinking by comparing these two groups of learner-players in the CPS task. The early results show that the participants from Kyiv, who had lived through almost a year of war, were much more flexible and creative in their DT than the refugee participants in France. This suggests that the stressful environment in Kyiv may have contributed to the development of more original and diverse ideas, possibly due to daily problem-solving activities within war constraints. Playful situations in wartime allowed Kyiv participants to exhibit higher divergent thinking than participants in France. This suggests that wartime constraints may enhance strategies for generating novel ideas while highlighting the positive impact of engaging in game activities on divergent thinking, even in stressful situations.