Background: Group work plays a significant role in facilitating creative tasks and fostering student creativity, much like collaborative painting is an effective strategy for enhancing team creativity. Successful group work necessitates the establishment of efficient socially shared regulation (SSR). However, in current face-to-face learning environments, high-quality regulation is impeded because of challenges faced by team members in achieving sufficient social interaction, effective regulation and adjusting created content after monitoring and evaluation. Consequently, students struggle to generate high-quality work within group settings. Objectives: The present study explores the frequency and quality of students' SSR, the social interaction among students during socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL), and the performance of group creative tasks using an SSRL-based co-creation approach in the metaverse (Meta-CC). Methods: Via a quasi-experimental design, a total of 63 Chinese students in fifth grade were recruited and randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group, with 33 students utilising the Meta-CC approach, whereas the remaining 30 students followed the conventional SSRL-based co-creation (C-CC) approach. The Meta-CC approach not only provides favourable psychological conditions for implementing SSRL in the collaborative process, but also offers a shared virtual space and digital creation tools for conducting creative tasks. The data collection included students' painting works and the painting process. Results and Conclusions: The results demonstrate that the experimental group was significantly better than the control group in terms of frequency and quality of students' SSR, degree of social interaction and creative work performance. This study demonstrates the value of integrating SSRL within the metaverse in facilitating socialised creative activities. Moreover, it informs the design of future creative activities in the metaverse and enriches the theory of SSRL in technological environments and its practical applications.