When Children Own the Research Instrument: A Cross-Study Analysis of Child-Driven Inquiry Across Five Contexts (DATASET)

The Blue Blocks Micro Research Institute spent the spring of 2026 running a five-case Working Paper Series on a single question: when adolescents are given ownership of a research instrument under different conditions, what do they produce that adult-designed instruments would have missed? The five cases — children as researchers in a neurodivergent-run workspace, an engineering challenge with a built-in first failure, a structured debate in which ownership was stripped at the moment of peak performance, an unscripted Q&A with a blind senior banker, and a multi-session palaeontology programme on real Eocene fossils — are now all published as separate Zenodo records. This dataset is what those five separate records cannot be on their own: the side-by-side analytical view. Eight Excel sheets condense the series into a single workbook — case metadata, hypothesis verdicts, engagement behaviours, instrument designs, emergent findings, twenty-five verbatim quotes from students and observers, twenty-three documented limitations rated for severity, and a codebook for the value vocabularies. Nothing in this workbook is new evidence; everything in it is structured restatement of evidence already public in the five manuscripts. The point is to make the cross-case comparison — which findings repeat, which methods produced which kinds of seeing, where the series failed to see what it tried to see — legible to the cross-study synthesis paper that will close the series, to reusers running their own case-series programmes, and to any reader who wants to ask the five-case questions the individual papers cannot answer alone.