Press Release

Here's the press release that was issued by the Universities Media Department for the project....


Local youngsters design classroom of the future

Students from the University of Sheffield are working with local school pupils to design an innovative classroom of the future, as part of an outreach architecture project.

Year 8 pupils from Parkwood Academy in Sheffield are working with students from the University to look at a number of factors including colour, comfort and flexibility, to design a room that promotes creative thinking and uses the pupil’s talents to help them learn.

This has included looking at a range of designs, including a classroom that could cater for both cooking lessons and maths classes to see whether combining these subjects helps pupils learn more effectively. The pupils have also looked at recent examples of school design, including the Hellerup School in Denmark, which innovatively creates a range of learning environments and let the pupils chooses how they would like to use them.

Parkwood Academy, formerly Parkwood High School in Shirecliffe, became an Academy on 1st September 2009 and is sponsored by the Edutrust Academies Charitable Trust (EACT). As part of the new direction the school has taken, pupils are involved in designing a new experimental learning environment to help the school test out innovative ideas before they move into a new building in 2012. In addition to involving pupils in decisions about their future learning space, the project also aims to encourage pupils to aspire to Higher Education by raising awareness of what it has to offer.

The collaboration is part of the University students’ ‘Live Project’, which sees them working with charities, community groups and schools, on real life architecture projects.

Alan Macdonald, from the University’s Department of Architecture, said: "We are excited to be working with the pupils to test and develop new ways in which they could learn. It's really interesting to be helping them to discover how they would like to learn and challenging the preconception of what a classroom could be. By getting their ideas and putting them into a design format, we can create a productive learning environment that future pupils at the school will really benefit from.”