NaCanva: Exploring and Enabling the Nature-Inspired Creativity for Children

Nature has been a bountiful source of materials, replenishment, inspiration, and creativity. Nature collage, as a crafting technique, offers children a fun and educational way to explore nature and express their creativity. However, the collection of raw material has been limited to static objects like leaves, ignoring inspiration from nature’s sounds and dynamic elements such as babbling creeks. To address this limitation, we have developed a mobile application with the aim of encouraging children’s creativity through renewed material collection and careful observation in nature. To explore the possibility of this approach, we conducted a formative study with children (N=20) and a design workshop with experts (N=6). With the results of these studies, we formulate NaCanva, an AI-assisted multi-modal collage creation system for children. Drawing upon the interactive relationship between children and nature, NaCanva facillitates a multi-modal material collection, including images, sound, and videos, which differs our system from traditional collages. We validated this system with a between-subject user study (N =30), and the results indicated that NaCanva enhances children’s multidimensional observation and engagement with nature, thereby unleashing their creativity in the creation of nature collages.