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.”

Suggestive images for the childrens feedback...

What we learnt from the WonderWall...

Lesson 4: Prototyping

Arriving slightly late due to traffic and other distractions, I arrived at the school yesterday morning to find the group hard at work striping back parts of the wall for the day's lesson.

After three lessons working with the students introducing them to new ideas and exploring what they knew, we were set to physically transform the classroom allowing them and others at the school to experience different spaces. Using a variety of everyday items ranging from fabrics, sand bags, cushions, lamps to washing lines and bulldog clips, we split into three groups, each group looking at a different scale space and idea.

Group one focused on performance and cat walks, exploring large scale spaces with the students and ways that lessons could be presented. The second group took on the theme of 'an artisit's garden', focusing on light and ways to work. Group three went for a small scale space entitled 'star gazing' and was interested in creating a space in which you could escape and undertake activities such as reading and quiet group work.

Despite a slightly manic start, the students were excited and quickly went through a series of self-led processes exploring their ideas. Working in group three, Tim and myself watched as the students changed the direction dramatically within a few minutes. Starting with a large space surrounded by hanging fabric, the idea quickly evolved into a small scale space using the traditional tables as a cave like environment until finally they settled on a den type structure, explaining that they liked the fact that you could come into the space and escape the classroom environment, not being distracted by the others around.

One Mock Up

We had arranged a double period with the some of the students and spent the second lesson evolving the topics the students had raised into a usable space for a class.

Since the creation of this prototype space, three class have taken place and we are now working with the feedback, or own observations and the ideas raised to create a workable space which can be implemented within the next few weeks.

The future of Learning

Short video on the possibilities that technology offers us in learning:

Lesson 3: Becoming a Designer

This morning we had our third lesson with the class and after a couple of internal group meetings last week, we adapted our approach to the lesson by breaking away from working in groups.

We started by removing all the furniture from the classroom, enabling everyone to sit on the floor in a circle during the lesson and undertake an informal discussion about the project. After spending a short time introducing the role of an architect to the class (part of this involving presenting a selection of our past work so they could see our different ways of working and communicating), we went through a series of short discussions regarding our client, Mr. Mallaband and his role; the brief and what this entailed; and a timeline for the project allowing the students to better understand the limits.

Making a Timeline

We then expanded upon this, the students formulating questions regarding how the staff body would prefer their teaching spaces and what could be done to make them better. Soon the class was excited and the DT teacher, Miss Bovis, kindly allowed the students to pick their favourite teacher and quickly run and ask them the questions they had come up with. Whilst we were doing this, some of the teaching staff also popped in to see how we were getting on, some having a brief chat with us about their classrooms.

Though slightly skeptical about how this was going to work in the short time we had available, some of the answers the students returned with were very exciting and encouraging. Hopefully after we have managed to sift through these we will have some examples up.

New Line Academy

This was suggested as precedent by one of the teachers during our pupil/teacher consultation lesson today:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/lessons-without-walls-inside-the-school-of-the-future-1049793.html