Children's Drawings of Life-Sustaining Places from a Montessori School in Hyderabad

Structured observational coding of 81 children's drawings produced in response to the prompt 'Draw a place where life can exist.' The dataset was created by researcher Sandhya Rao under the Blue Blocks Micro Research Institute's participatory methodology and was last updated on April 23, 2026. It includes coding across 30 binary element categories organized into five domains, such as water and vegetation, with a subset coded by a second observer for reliability testing.

Use Cases

• Analyze the prevalence of biophilic versus built environment elements in children's spontaneous imagery based on the 30 coded categories.
• Investigate age-related differences in environmental representation across the three participant age groups (6–8, 9–12, and 13–16 years).
• Assess inter-rater reliability for observational coding of children's drawings using the 22-drawing subset coded by a second independent observer.
• Study the relationship between a drawing's dominant orientation and its total biophilic element count as defined in the coding instrument.

Strengths

• Includes 81 participant drawings across three distinct age cohorts.
• Coding is structured across 30 binary element categories organized into five thematic domains.
• Contains a subset of 22 drawings coded by a second observer for inter-rater reliability assessment.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count for the primary dataset is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data is from a single session at one school in Hyderabad, India, which may limit generalizability.

Provenance

Source

Blue Blocks Montessori School, Hyderabad, India; Blue Blocks Micro Research Institute.

Collection Method

Drawings collected in a single session using an open-ended prompt, then coded following the Blue Blocks Embedded Observation Protocol (BEOP v1.0).

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-23 18:46:24; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Hyderabad, India.