Interactive at School

Children think with their bodies. A five-year-old understands a thing by standing up inside it, by reaching for it, by carrying it across the room in both hands. We made Interactive at School because we wanted a classroom that could meet a child right there — technology and play folded into one, so a child stays a child at play and the learning simply arrives with them. A new way to play, built to be the best one for kids.

Fly like an airplane, and the wall flies with you

Spread your arms wide and you are an airplane, and the whole wall agrees, and off you go to gather up balloons. Learning on your feet needed a room that could keep up, so we built an interactive installation that lives inside an ordinary kindergarten classroom: a 3D camera up above, reading children. Whatever a child does with their body, the program does with them. Become a flashlight and the forest lights up wherever you point it. Keep walking and the room hands you a different city.

Become a flashlight, and the forest opens up where you point it.

Hands are just as welcome. A palm goes flat against a projected flower and the flower answers under it. Body tracking, hand tracking, a great deal of gamification — and the happy result of all three is that the children hold the controls the whole way through. Everything on that wall moves because a child made it move.

Everything on the wall moves because a child made it move.

Fast parts to play, slow parts to work it out

A morning of pure motion is a wonderful thing, and we wanted room to breathe inside it. So the games come with a stack of printed cards, and the pace changes the moment they come out. The quick stretches are for running and reaching. The slower ones are for sitting down on the floor with a card in your hands, looking properly, counting, adding up, deciding which one is the answer.

Seven cards, one right answer, and a rib cage printed on card number two.

This one is our favourite, because it holds the whole idea in a single move: the paper in a child's hands and the picture on the wall are one continuous thing. On the wall stands a drawn boy at an X-ray screen, a green ring waiting over his chest, an animal doctor waiting beside him. On the table there are cards. A child picks up the one with the rib cage on it, holds it up to the camera — and the rib cage arrives inside the boy on the wall, right in the middle of the ring. The thing in your hands becomes the thing the whole room can see.

More than a hundred games, straight from the curriculum

Every game here starts from the curriculum. Interactive learning is at its best when a child walks away knowing something new, so we took the topics the Ministry of Education sets out for a kindergarten year and turned them into games — more than a hundred of them, ready to pick from. Parts of the body. Counting. Adding up. Vehicles, families, nature, and the ordinary things sitting around the room.

The slow half of the morning: sitting, watching, working out what happens next.

And because the wall can be anything, the room can be anywhere. A forest. A city street. A clinic with an animal doctor in it. Children get to stand in the places they have only ever heard about, and they come back with the lesson already in their legs and their hands.

A morning like this ends with a room full of kindergarteners who are not ready to sit down yet. They have flown. They have walked into a forest. They have put a rib cage inside a boy on a wall and watched it land. All of it comes out again at dinner. If you are thinking about a classroom that plays back, or experience design for children of your own, we would love to hear what you have in mind.