School Program

By teaching children to design and to make through creative and critical thinking while using new technologies we want to help children and teachers become 'Future Ready'.
Our method does exactly that. It combines learning and making with the real world issues which encourages children in making the world a better place.

Designathon Works School Kit offers a wide variety of teaching materials for making big and small projects at school or at location. We call them designathons.

To date the program is used in 30 schools in the Netherlands and is available in English, Dutch, German, French and Arabic.

If you are interested in introducing the method to schools or after-school programs in your region, please contact us.

Download our PDF

Our methodology has an underlying pedagogical model inspired by Reggio Emilia, John Dewey’s Child and Curriculum and Seymour Papert’s Learning theory constructionism.

The Learning by Design Cycle, combines Design Thinking for children, with the Maker Movement approach to making, all structured in experiential projects. The process has been especially adapted for children and enhanced with reflection moments for the educational context.

The process was first developed and tested for the Global Children's Designathon in 2014.

Learning Objectives

Through designathons, children learn to:

Cultivate their creativity:

apply design thinking to a social challenge
think creatively and critically about proposed solutions
cultivate their sense of curiosity and imagination

Make with new and old technologies:

sketch and build prototypes
program with Scratch
develop robots and interactive machines

Life long skills:

develop empathy and understanding for other perspectives;
collaborate with their peers
communicate their ideas
and think philosophically about society

WHAT ABOUT TEACHERS?

Through designathons, teachers gain:

knowledge and skills on technology (and programming / engineering)
self-confidence to transfer that knowledge into practice
enthusiasm to apply the new approach to the existing themes in the classroom

What Makes Us Different?

There are a lot of great methods coming up which engage children in learning to program and make. Our method does this too and goes two steps further:

it combines learning and making with real world issues which encourages children making the world a better place
its underlying design process which children and teachers learn through, contributes to changing the whole education system, it’s a new way of learning, which can be applied to all subjects

See more about designathon at schools in the Netherlands www.designathonschool.com

Watch our video made during the designathon lesson

Or download our presentation.