Children (19 2-year-olds & 19 3-year-olds) and their parents visited the  Children’s Lab in the Summer of 2016. Children played with the original rectangular unusual box on one visit and the new triangular box on the other. Parents filled in questionnaires about their child’s creativity during both visits.

Research assistants worked with us to code the videos for the number of different actions that each child made while playing with the box. Preliminary analysis of this data suggest that there was a strong relationship between the number of actions that the children made with the two boxes – that is children who made more actions with one box also made more actions with the other box. This suggests that both boxes are a good measure of divergent thinking – the ability to come up with ideas. Furthermore, the originality of the ideas that each children came up with when playing the two boxes was also strongly related.

Some age differences were found. Overall 3-year-olds tended to come up with a greater number of ideas and also more original ideas than the 2-year-olds. Additionally:

2-year-olds made fewer different actions when playing with the triangular compared to rectangular box

3-year-olds produced more original actions when playing with the triangular compared to rectangular box

Therefore, although both boxes seem to be a good measure of divergent thinking the features of each box seem to result in differences in performance. We are currently working with children in the University Nursery to develop the second box so that fewer differences in performance are found.