Abstract:

The ongoing international Learning Environment Applications (LEA) project, funded by the European Union and Erasmus+ , is investigating application fields to disseminate participatory practice for the design of school spaces (Woolner 2018, Watschinger – Weyland 2017, Montag Stiftung 2012, Kumpulainen, Krokfors 2011), called in German-speaking countries "phase zero"(Weyland, Galletti 2018). This particular participatory phase of space design serves to conduct an in-depth investigation of the needs of the people who inhabit the school and allow them to make concrete decisions and give voice to their needs (Weyland et al. 2019). This practice aims to increase the connections between software and hardware, bridging space and learning (Hertzberger 2008), in the school by providing precise information to designers about the organization of spaces needed for teaching and learning. Within this project, several application fields useful for the diffusion of "Phase 0" (Montag Stiftung 2012) have been investigated and assigned to the different partners from Germany, Austria, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland: a publication, an application, a Massive Open Online Course or MOOC, a board game. Specifically, the research aims to produce a board game (Weyland 2017) addressed to teaching and non-teaching school staff, pupils of different ages, parents, designers, administrators, to encourage dialogue through the playful experience, in the design phase of school spaces, gathering the needs of all participants. The game will consist of supports to represent more easily the new ideas of school spaces by the participants, allowing in a playful way to represent their aims, desires, proposes and changes by creating mood boards. To increase the possibilities of dissemination and reproducibility of the game by schools and families, a kit is being developed to be produced and assembled through Fablabs all over the world (Savastano et al. 2017), with the possibility of creating communities where users can give testimonials on the use, suggest changes, submit updates.

References:
[1] Hertzberger, H. (2008), Space and Learning. 010 Publishers,
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[3] Kumpulainen K., Krokfors L. (2010), Learning Bridges - Toward Participatory Learning Environments, Helsinki University Print, Helsinki.
[4] Savastano M., Bellini F., D’Ascenzo F., Scornavacca E. (2017) FabLabs as Platforms for Digital Fabrication Services: A Literature Analysis. In: Za S. et al. (eds) Exploring Services Science. IESS 2017. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 279. Springer, Cham.
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Keywords:

Learning, Environment, Applications, European, Project, School, Participation, design, space, dissemination, phase 0, fab lab.