Educational Origami

A year and a bit ago, I had to move from my computer lab into a new classroom space. While my first visions were of a variation on the same theme, desks and desktops, I was given an option for laptops instead of desktops and this changed every thing.

The classroom I had been presented with was a high ceiling (A frame style) rectangular box. In reality a normal classroom. However I was given the opportunity to design it to suit my needs and I wanted and needed a agile and flexible learning environment that is students centric. It need to be able to change quickly (agile) and fit into a variety of setting (flexible) with students workspaces.

So with this in mind, here is the design I came up with:

• around the outside of the room is a 60cm deep continuous bench with power and networking. The bench is at the same level as the other furniture. In hind sight I would have made the corners at stool height rather than chair height to allow students to stand and when focusing at the front see over the other students.
• Instead of desks I had 4 1.2m wide x 2.0m long tables with a semi-circular return that can be folded up or down made. The tables are on lockable wheels and are at the same hieght as the side bench.
• All the chairs are on wheels and are adjustable hieght, I also has 75cm & 85cm Swiss balls for students to sit on.
• At 4 stations around the outside of the room are whiteboards for the students to use. There is no teacher whiteboard but there is a IWB with a short throw projector
• Across the front of the room and around the room are individually switched spot lights (I used a 100w mini parcan) which illuminate the front of the classroom or the areas adjacent to each of the whiteboards.
• The windows have a full black out blind allowing the room to be blacked out when required. The blinds roll up and down easily for natural light.
• There is NO teachers desk only a podium (a platform large enough for a laptop on a single metal pole and again on wheels) for the laptop to sit on and an umbilical for audio and visual send and also network connection for video conferencing.

The classroom is designed to work in a number of different “mode” and switch bewteen modes takes about 2 minutes. Here are some of the different learning modes:

I am experimenting with the arrangement of the tables, but these two are the one  I use the most. the classroom is great, and I regularly rearrange the room between classes, the students never know what the room will be like and as a result never know what to expect or what is going to happen this time in the class.