Meet the scientists!

Before you start wondering why I have such a funny last name, that is because I am originally from the Netherlands (the country of tulips and wooden shoes). I moved to Scotland two years ago, and started as a scientist a couple of months ago.

I am a Psychologist, which means I look at people and how they behave. When I was still studying at university I loved everything about people, but the older I got the more I liked working with children. They are very honest in what they tell you, and working with them always makes me very happy.

The research I am doing is a three-year project, in which I will look at young children pretending. As you might have seen in younger siblings, children start pretending to have tea parties or dress up as a superhero when they are still quite young (scientists now think that children start pretending for the first time when they are around two years old). I am curious if children who are more creative will also be better at pretending.

I will be working on this project for the next three years, but since I’ve only just started I am still trying to figure out how I could measure which children are more creative than the other. Because no one has looked at creativity in children this young, I had to become creative myself and built my own test that could help me.

One of the greatest thing I have done so far in my job is that I have built my own test to measure creativity. This test looks like a colourful box with a lot of very exciting things attached to it, like strings and blocks. When I go to work in the morning I take this box with me to the nursery and give it to a child to play with. They also get some weird toys to play with (some of them are actually pet toys, but don’t tell anyone ).

When nursery is over and the kids go home, I take all my toys with me again and go to the office, where I can look back on video what the kids have done. I count how many different things they have done with both the box and the toys. A child who has done more different things would be more creative than a child who has done less. For example, some kids just use the toys to bang on the box, but others pretend that toys are actual people and play around with the box like it’s a dollhouse!

In the past I have done a special type of acting, called improvisational theatre. It is a great way of acting, because you don’t know what you are going to play beforehand (it’s a bit like the tv show “who’s line is this anyway?”). This encourages people not to be afraid of new things and respond to whatever happens. If I win the price, I would love to give some workshops at schools in this type of acting, together with talking to radio stations and news papers about how important pretending and being creative is.