Pedagogical Strategies in Social Robots for Child Engagement and Creativity: A Scoping Review

Advances in artificial intelligence and social robotics have expanded the role of interactive robots as pedagogical tools, though their diverse methodologies remain insufficiently systematized. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a scoping review mapped under the PRISMA-ScR framework, analyzing 15 recent studies (2020–2026) retrieved from major scientific databases. The review investigates how pedagogical strategies, multimodal integration, and creative robot behaviors influence children’s sustained engagement and storytelling performance. Our thematic analysis demonstrates that effective child-robot interaction emerges from the integration of four core pillars: pedagogical adaptivity, child agency, multimodal synchrony, and external social mediation. Additionally, robots acting as creative partners were shown to boost narrative fluency and originality. This review provides design guidelines for future longitudinal human-robot interventions while addressing current research limitations, such as the predominance of controlled laboratory settings.