Drawing Life: Spontaneous Biophilic Imagery in Children’s Responses to an Open-Ended Prompt — A Pilot Study from Blue Blocks Montessori School, Hyderabad, India (DATASET)

This dataset contains structured observational coding of children's drawings produced in response to the open-ended prompt "Draw a place where life can exist," administered during a single session at Blue Blocks School, Hyderabad, India. The study is a pilot investigation into biophilic orientation in children — that is, the degree to which children spontaneously represent natural versus built environments when asked to imagine a life-sustaining place. File 001 contains the primary dataset: 81 participants across three age groups (6–8, 9–12, and 13–16 years), coded across 30 binary element categories organized into five domains — water elements, plant/vegetation elements, animal/living creature elements, sky/light/atmospheric elements, and human-made/built environment elements. Each drawing was assessed for dominant orientation, overall environment classification, setting type, and total biophilic element count. Observer surprise notes are included where recorded. File 002 contains a second independent observer's coding of a subset of 22 drawings (12 from the Erdkinder adolescent cohort, 10 overlapping with File 001), collected for inter-rater reliability testing. The coding instrument and element categories are identical across both files. This dataset was produced under the Blue Blocks Micro Research Institute's participatory micro-research methodology. All data collection, coding, and anonymisation procedures followed the Blue Blocks Embedded Observation Protocol (BEOP v1.0, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19087415) and the Micro Research Ethics Framework (MREF v1.0, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19047669).