Partner with a school of your choice
We are inviting you, the designer, to work with students and teachers to design the classroom of the future for a school of your choosing. Your design should address the unique challenges your school faces in trying to provide innovative, safe and sustainable learning spaces.
Find out what teachers and students in your school need to make their learning environments more effective. Does the classroom inspire learning? Is it overcrowded? Noisy? Does the classroom have natural daylight? What obstacles prevent schools from upgrading classrooms or building additional classroom space? Show us how your design would address the obstacles to providing inspiring learning spaces in your school.
You may partner with any primary or secondary school. (Please note: Classroom designs for universities and other training academies are not eligible to win.) The school you choose to partner with can be a local school or one in another region or country. Student participation is strongly encouraged and will be considered by the jury. The competition focuses on the design of a single, replicable adaptable classroom. Design teams are not asked to submit designs for an entire school.
We've created teacher resources, including a design curriculum and web casts to help you engage and inspire students. Who knows, one of the students you work with could be the next Calatrava. And, you could be the one who inspired them to become a design professional.
• How can we get students excited about learning? What can we change about the current classroom?
• How do people learn: visual or auditory?
• What could we change? The how we learn (pedagogy) vs. what we learn (curriculum).
• Design a classroom that has components of classroom & workshop – Like Brooklyn Tech.
• Create a “hub” with workshop shared space as the center and the classrooms surrounding it.
• Perhaps explore satellite classroom conditions to maximize the diversity of learning.
• Are we designing for fantasy or reality?
• Are we designing based on or for Pedagogy (how you teach) or curriculum (what you teach)
• Sustainable school design – closed food chain like St. Phillips academy.
• Gardens that help students learn how to cultivate, harvest and cook with organic foods like what Alice Waters’ edible classroom program.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Waters
• Create a dialog and interaction between the outside and inside classrooms:
http://www.naturesclassroom.org/
• Perhaps use current events and issues facing the community to update curriculum. For example in an urban setting there are math, physics, government & science lessons all based on the congestion pricing debate.
• Do surveys of teachers and students to see what they think are assets or liabilities. Have them take pictures of spaces or places to answer survey questions, i.e. this space makes me happy, I feel safe here, etc.
• Design ideas: vertical garden, vertical trailer (for its expansion in city where there is no space available), box or not box?....
• Todo list: image bank to be set up; sketches sketches!