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

Abstract

This working paper reports a preregistered pilot study run at an AMI-certified Montessori school in Hyderabad, India, built around one deceptively simple question: when children are invited to draw "a place where life can exist," what do they actually put on the page? Eighty-one children aged 6 to 16 completed the open-ended task in a single group art session, with no cue steering them toward nature. Trained observers scored every drawing against a five-part element scheme (water, vegetation, animals and living creatures, sky and light, and built environment) and gave each an overall orientation rating. The paper documents how consistently natural imagery dominated over urban imagery, how that tendency thinned across successive age bands, and how buildings — when present — tended to sit as small embedded features inside otherwise green scenes rather than as the subject. Aimed at educators and researchers in nature-based, Montessori, and biomimicry settings, it treats the drawing prompt as a low-cost diagnostic of a child's underlying ecological orientation. The deposit follows the institute's embedded-research protocols and links to an openly archived coded dataset so the design can be replicated across other school types and cultures.