Open-Ended Block Play Builds Weird Thinkers and That's the Point

The Oasis Health Journal · Submitted August 13, 2026 · 4:34 PM EDT

By Ray 'Sleeves' Okafor · Edited by Mona Trell

So a team at the University of Arizona spent thirty-seven years watching kids play with blocks. Thirty-seven years. That is longer than some marriages. Longer than most careers. Long enough to watch a toddler grow up, have kids, and bring them kids back to the same lab. And what they found was: the kids who built weird stuff scored higher on divergent thinking tests than the kids who followed the picture on the box. Independent of IQ. That part matters. That part means the instructions might be holding your kid back.

Divergent thinking is the researcher name for what happens when you ask somebody to list uses for a brick and they give you forty-three answers instead of three. It is the opposite of following instructions. It is coming up with twelve ways to solve a problem when everybody else in the room got two. And creative building blocks for kids that got no right answer, no instruction manual, no picture of the finished castle, them blocks correlate with that skill stronger than almost anything else they measured. Stronger than income. Stronger than parent education. Stronger than the fancy preschool with the waiting list.

Now look. This ain't new-age nonsense. This is longitudinal research published in peer-reviewed journals across multiple countries. They tested kids in Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Chile, France, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Mexico, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. Ages three to adult. Different languages. Different economic backgrounds. Same result every time. You cannot blame the culture. You cannot blame the curriculum. The blocks work everywhere.

What Open-Ended Block Play Actually Measures (and What It Don't)

The study calls them loose parts. That is the technical term. Loose parts are materials that ain't got one fixed purpose. Blocks, cardboard tubes, fabric scraps, acorns, anything a kid can move, combine, line up, take apart, stack sideways, and redesign seventeen times in an hour. The researchers specifically tracked what they called flexibility, which is how many different ways a kid uses the same piece during play. Not how tall the tower gets. Not how close it looks to the box. How many different things they tried.

And here is what they found: the more ways a child manipulated the same material, the stronger the correlation to creative problem-solving scores later. Not a little stronger. A lot stronger. A 2025 systematic review of twenty-five studies confirmed that unstructured construction play with these kinds of materials linked to improvements in problem-solving, creativity, academic skills in reading and math, and both convergent and divergent thinking. Twenty-five studies. That is more evidence than we got for half the things doctors tell you to do.

Convergent thinking is finding the one right answer. Divergent thinking is generating a bunch of possible answers. American schools test for the first one and almost never the second. So the kid who can think of eighteen ways to use a cardboard box gets the same grade as the kid who can only think of one, and we wonder why everybody grows up narrow. We built a whole system that rewards one skill and ignores the other, then we act shocked when nobody can improvise.

The Arizona research used something called the DISCOVER assessment. That stands for Discovering Intellectual Skills and Capability while Observing Varied Ethnic Responses, which is a whole mouthful to say we finally stopped assuming every smart kid looks the same. They did not ask kids questions. They watched what kids built. And they found that observable behavior during open ended block play predicted creative capability more reliably than a written test. More reliably. You hear what I said? The thing the kid does with their hands told them more than the thing the kid bubbles in with a pencil.

The Blocks That Work Best Ain't Got Instructions

Now I'm gonna tell you what this looks like at my counter. Parent comes in, wants the best blocks for creative play and problem solving. I show them three options. First bucket: fancy European blocks, all the same size, smooth as butter, hundred dollars, comes with a booklet showing you the twelve official structures. Second bucket: magnetic tiles, forty-five dollars, builds pretty geometric shapes, very popular, every influencer got a video. Third bucket: plain wooden unit blocks, thirty-two dollars, no picture on the box, no instructions, just blocks in a bag that weighs more than the toddler.

They always reach for the magnetic tiles. Every single time.

And I gotta tell them: the tiles are great. The tiles are fun. But the tiles snap together one way. You cannot stack a square on a triangle sideways and make it work. The tile teaches the kid what fits. The plain block teaches the kid to figure out what might fit if you try it this way, or that way, or balanced on the corner like that even though it should not stand but it does. One of them is a lesson. The other one is a guess. Your kid needs both, but they only getting one at school.

The research backs this up. A 2026 framework published in the Journal of Intelligence identified eight types of affordances in materials and games that support creativity. Affordances is the researcher word for what a thing lets you do with it. Eight types. They named eight. And the number one affordance? Degree of flexibility. How many ways can you use it. How much does it let you mess around. How long before it tells you you did it wrong.

The same framework noted that narrative flexibility, tool variety, environmental interaction, content creation, and replayability all correlate with creative development. You know what that describes? A bucket of imagination building block sets with no preordained ending. You dump them out, you build a thing, it falls, you build a different thing, your little sister knocks it over, you build a wall to keep her out, she climbs over the wall, you build a trap. That is replayability. That is content creation by a four-year-old. That is also a normal Tuesday and we been calling it a mess when we should have been calling it a laboratory.

The Mess Is Not a Bug

Here is the part that makes parents nervous. The research does not say the kid needs to finish the structure. It does not say the kid needs to build something recognizable. It does not say you should be able to look at it and know what it is. It says the kid needs to engage in what they call concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. That is the four-step learning cycle the framework names, and it is a fancy way of saying: try it, look at it, think about it, try it again different.

A kid building the castle on the box completes step one and stops. A kid building a castle, then a spaceship, then deciding the spaceship is actually a bridge, then taking it apart because the bridge needs a tower in the middle, that kid just ran the whole cycle three times in twelve minutes. That kid is learning to think sideways. That kid is learning to pivot when the first idea don't work. And the floor looks like a disaster.

The disaster is the point. The disaster is the data.

Now, the 2025 review noted that five studies found no association between play materials and cognitive outcomes, and seven others did not even address the relationship. So this is not a guarantee. This is not magic. But twenty studies found positive links, and the ones that worked best all had the same thing in common: the materials did not tell the kid what to do. The materials did not have an opinion. The materials just sat there and let the kid be wrong sixty times before they got it right.

I'm not saying throw out the Lego sets. Lego is great. Lego teaches patience, fine motor skills, following complex instructions, and finishing what you started. Those are real skills. But if that is the only kind of building your kid ever does, you are training one kind of thinking. You are not training the other kind. And the other kind is the one that matters when they twenty-eight years old and the job they got hired for just changed and nobody wrote a manual.

What This Means for What Blocks Are Best for Imaginative Play

The research does not name brands. The research names attributes. And the attributes that correlate with divergent thinking development are: no single correct outcome, multiple ways to combine pieces, materials that can be repurposed mid-play, and enough variety that a kid has to make decisions instead of following a pattern. That is it. That is the list. You can spend a hundred dollars on it or you can spend eight.

That could be unit blocks. That could be divergent thinking toys like pattern blocks, Magna-Tiles used off-script, or even cardboard boxes and paper towel tubes if you got enough of them. It could be any construction toys for creative thinking development that do not come with a picture of the one right answer. It could be anything that lets a kid fail in private and try again without an adult stepping in to fix it.

I keep a bin of loose wood scraps from a lumber yard next to the block section. Parents look at it like I forgot to throw it away. I did not forget. Those scraps are fifteen cents a pound and they teach the same skill as the forty-dollar German beech blocks. A kid who learns to balance a triangle on a cylinder learns something. A kid who learns to balance a warped piece of pine on a chunk of two-by-four that ain't even square learns to solve a problem nobody wrote instructions for. That second kid is gonna be fine when life gets weird. And life always gets weird.

The Arizona team tracked outcomes into adulthood. Thirty-seven years, remember? They did not just watch the kids play and call it a day. They followed up. And the kids who scored high on creative problem-solving in early assessments did not all become artists. They became engineers, teachers, small business owners, designers, the kind of people who see a situation and think of something nobody else thought of. That skill does not come from following directions. It comes from the hours you spent as a six-year-old figuring out how to build a ramp out of blocks that were not meant to be a ramp.

So when somebody asks me what blocks are best for imaginative play, I tell them: the ones without the picture. The ones that do not look impressive on the shelf. The ones where your kid builds something that does not make sense to you but makes perfect sense to them. The ones that make you nervous because you cannot tell if they doing it right.

And then I sell them a bucket for thirty-two dollars and I do not apologize for the mess they about to have on they floor. That mess is thirty-seven years of research doing its job. That mess might be the smartest thing happening in your house.

This article is education and reporting on published research. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Talk to your own clinician about your own situation.

Sources

1. Games and Creativity: A Theoretical Framework, Journal of Intelligence (2026).
2. The Relationship Between Children's Indoor Loose Parts Play and Cognitive Development: A Systematic Review, Journal of Intelligence (2025).
3. Observation: unlocking, assessing, and nurturing creative problem solving, Frontiers in psychology (2025).