ODYSSEYWARE

What would a student do if he or she could build a classroom around their own desires and preferences?  That is the question Open Architecture Network (OAN), an open source community for building design, posed to students throughout the country.  By 2015, just six short years away, the World Bank estimates that the world will need 10 million new classrooms throughout 100 different countries in order to educate the burgeoning world population of kids.  To accommodate, countries, governments and schools will need to create cost-effective, well-thought out designs to keep pace with demand yet stay within finite budgets.  As such, high schools students throughout the world have been enlisted to submit their ideas and diagrams for future schools to the Better Classroom Design to combat what OAN calls an outdated and underutilized school model:

Classical High School was built during the 1950’s style of Brutalism, with rough concrete and large repetitive angular spaces. Throughout the school we encountered an overabundance of these large spaces being unused and unrelated to the scale of the student. We saw this as opportunity to transform these spaces into engaging environment that promotes learning and creativity.

Oddly, with limited parameters, students did not create video game parlors or basketball courts.  On the contrary, they took very sober, focused views of what a future classrooms should look like and how they could learn in the most productive manner.  Classical High School’s students in Rhode Island chose to restructure the seat and chalkboard structure with more comfortable benches.  Tangerang High School in Indonesia’s students chose to create an open school structure which allowed for greater air flow to their classrooms.  Their current school is L-shaped and, as such, is not conducive to natural air flows and because the town is too poor to provide air conditioning, students rely on cool breezes especially in the warm weather months.

Finally, Envision Academy in Oakland California’s students chose a coffee shop model which allows students to work from laptops while sipping lattes and eating pastries.  The teacher, presumably not involved in the food preparation while instructing, would walk around and chat with students while they worked, rather than holding lectures from the front of the classroom.