Humans have the capacity to invent novel ideas and to create new artifacts that affect the surrounding environment. However, it is unclear how this capacity emerges and develops in biological systems. This paper presents an empirical study which investigates the development of novelty-based cognitive processes in the context of unstructured music-making activities in early childhood. We used principles of intuitive theories of emergence, the paradigm of overlapping waves of mechanisms of change and theories of music cognitive development to theoretically conceptualize the developmental process in the specific context. We applied the methodological principles of micro-genetic analysis for the development of an annotation scheme of micro-behaviors, which correspond to a set of cognitive processes. We took into consideration child's behavioral manifestations of music-induced affective engagement, as an indicator of intrinsic motivation. Our results suggest that the process of transition from spontaneous towards deliberate actions develops through exploratory actions, evaluation of the outcomes, reasoning and planning. The structure of these actions appears in the form of dynamic overlapping waves rather than in a linear or iterative manner. Additionally, our results indicate that children in early years make use of the affordances of the provided tools to scaffold their transition from concrete visual representation of sonic features towards abstract musical thinking, which suggests that musical development appears with the generative tension between action and symbol. Implications and future work are discussed regarding the development of intelligent robotic systems for user adaptive scaffolding of the observed mechanisms of change.

Many researchers have started to explore natural interaction scenarios for children. No matter if these children are normally developing or have special needs, evaluating Child- Robot Interaction (CRI) is a challenge. To find methods that work well and provide reliable data is difficult, for example because commonly used methods such as questionnaires do not work well particularly with younger children. Previous research has shown that children need support in expressing how they feel about technology. Given this, researchers often choose time-consuming behavioral measures from observations to evaluate CRI. However, these are not necessarily comparable between studies and robots. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from different disciplines to share their experiences on these aspects. The main topics are methods to evaluate child-robot interaction design, methods to evaluate socially assistive child-robot interaction and multi-modal evaluation of child-robot interaction. Connected questions that we would like to tackle are for example: i) What are reliable metrics in CRI? ii) How can we overcome the pitfalls of survey methods in CRI? iii) How can we integrate qualitative approaches in CRI? iv) What are the best practices for in the wild studies with children? Looking across disciplinary boundaries, we want to discuss advantages and shortcomings of using different evaluation methods in order to compile guidelines for future CRI research. This workshop is the second in a series that started at the International Conference on Social Robotics in 2015.