Turn your students into design champions.
Unleash the full potential of design thinking with our ready-made projects and transform your classroom into a true space for innovation.
Meet Design Champions!
A program with missions — real-life educational projects. Designed for the crucial formative years of 4-10. Made with design thinking from the ground up.
Explore the world with a range of themes and challenges
—
From astronauts and car designers to meteorologists and head chefs, our missions help immerse your students in real-life professions and human activities. With 9 missions in the program, you have a new topic to work on for each month of the school year.
Create a whole learning experience in the classroom
—
Instead of one-off activities, you have access to in-depth, structured projects with the right mix of design thinking tools, activities, presentations and learning materials. It all works together beautifully and feels like running your very own innovation camps in class.
Focus on what's most important in your work - the students
—
Because each mission comes ready to launch, it saves you significant time and effort to come up with projects on your own. So your focus shifts to working with your students and actually fostering those 21st century skills everyone is talking about.
Use the most powerful innovation method out there
—
It's one thing to make a good project and quite another to build it on a method used in leading organizations and companies worldwide. With design thinking, you foster a mindset for innovation with a whole range of proven tools and techniques to support it.
Engage parents, local communities and professionals
—
Learning happens everywhere. That's why our missions include activities to engage parents in the process, invite experts to discuss the challenge with the kids and cooperate with local communities and institutions for further exploration of the topics.
Make an investment in your own teaching skills and competences
—
'Learning by doing' is as important for the teachers as it is for the students. Our program is naturally expanding the capabilities of teachers and educators by enriching their skill-set for leading projects and group activities in the classroom.
Seven amazing challenges.
Each mission is a 5-day design sprint based on a profession or human activity.
Mission: Architect
Buildings in New York
Mission: Astronaut
On a Mission to the Solar System
Mission: Meteorologist
Helpful Weather Forecast
Mission: Explorer
Our Arctic Expedition
Mission: Ecologist
Wildlife in the Arctic Region
Mission: Traveller
On a Trip to Greenland
Mission: Car Designer
The Family Car of the Future
One program, many applications.
See how the program meets the goals of diverse teachers and educators.
'I аm transforming my classroom'
— Lilian, Public school teacher
Design Champions makes going to school a desirable thing for the students. It gives me the chance to offer them an emotional experience and foster confidence in their own abilities — something I have always strived to do. I am really happy when I see children entering the classroom with great enthusiasm — for them each mission brings a new challenge, helps them bring their best qualities forward and carries strong emotions long after it’s completed. It also provides a way for parents to visit our classes, offer their help and support me throughout the process.
'I аm creating an innovative school'
— Diana, School principal
In the last few years I have been on a path to searching for innovative methods in education. As a principal in the biggest school in my region with a 100-year history and 700 students from three ethnic groups, I wanted to foster change not only in classes and subjects, but also in the way teachers approach their work. Design Champions turned out to be a key element in this transformation and served as the model to go forward. We developed an innovation program, got the green light from the education ministry, set out to train the teachers and apply it with all first-graders in the school. After 4 months with the missions the results are more than encouraging — change of attitude in the teachers, amazing engagement of the students and great reduction of the levels of emotional and behavioural problems among them. The program also caught the attention of our community as well — parents, partners and colleagues from other schools.
'I аm making a difference in my educational center'
— Daffy, Teacher and educator
Our educational center has a regular program for after-school activities and workshops for children. We were looking for fresh approaches to enrich the program and that's how we found Design Champions. What intrigued us was the interesting take on professions and the way they are presented to the children using design thinking 'missions'. They allow the kids to become architects, explorers, astronauts or head chefs by learning more about these human activities, working in teams, discussing ideas with each other, searching for the best ways to try them out, creating a shared end product and successfully presenting it. I am convinced that building strong foundations for these skills will help children make much better decisions in the future.
Our design champions in action.—
See how children and teachers experience the program in real life.(tap a photo to enlarge and view the description)
