Futurium as a classroom

For Christian Engelbrecht, education officer at Futurium, houses like the Futurium lend themselves as extracurricular places of learning: "Institutions or organisations will play a greater role in the future - because they not only contribute to STEM education, but also shed light on topics such as climate change, biodiversity or sustainable development and decisively complement the learning content of the school," he says.

On five Fridays, the class eight pupils are currently guests at Futurium. With the help of the so-called 4 Cs - communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity - they design products on their own in small teams. The teachers act as coaches and accompany the groups digitally. To ensure that learning functions properly, the students work with their own tablets. They use them to create the products, do research and are supervised by the teachers. In the new year, the participants want to present the products. Classical grades will not be awarded, but the students will receive a certificate.

Badges instead of grades

Engelbrecht sees this as an opportunity for a new view of learning performance: "Competencies such as teamwork or solution-oriented thinking can be demonstrated, for example, in the form of badges. This is another, in my view more contemporary form of documenting learning achievements that goes beyond the traditional school report." Up to now, the learning of 21st century competences (futures literacy) has, after all, hardly been reflected in the grading system. "I can imagine that in the next few years it will become more important to show the individual learning success of students beyond grades and to enable them to take responsibility for their own learning paths," says Engelbrecht.

Futurium is also an extracurricular place of learning because you can not only deal with the challenges of the future through exhibits, on-site events and workshops, but also through educational offers that the Futurium provides digitally. These were developed with the Young Tinkerers and the Education Innovation Lab. The offers are aimed at individuals and classes. The Futurium's education department also offers free training for teachers on how to conduct project days at the Futurium.

Pandemic as a driver of digital learning

The Käthe Kollwitz Grammar School is also looking at new places of learning and unconventional learning methods: "Participating in the school experiment gives us the opportunity to continue what we have already started and to implement new ideas. We want to support learners in such a way that they act independently and self-organised, develop their creative potential and learn in an intrinsically motivated way. This requires flexible learning paths," says headmistress Simone Ley.

A total of 18 schools are participating in the school trial. Sandra Scheeres, Senator for Education, Youth and Family, comments: "The digitalisation of Berlin's schools has made significant progress in the pandemic. We want to continue to use the experience gained from school-guided learning at home and with other digital formats for lesson design. This school trial, which is also scientifically accompanied, serves this purpose." The model schools set their own priorities depending on their stage of development, location, type of school and profile. In order to reach as many Berlin schools as possible, the results of the school trial will be made available to the network schools in bar camps at the end of the school year