Digital Educational Opportunities for Schools: Futures Studies at Futurium

Working together with the non-profit organisation for young inventors Junge Tüftler and the Education Innovation Lab, Futurium has developed state-of-the-art formats for school workshops. These offerings are now available in digital form too. Pupils in Years 4 to 13 can become active themselves. The workshops are dedicated to topics such as “Technologies for a Sustainable World”, “Music of the Future” or “City of the Future” and challenge the participants to develop their own approaches to solutions.

Futurium aims to prepare pupils for the challenges of tomorrow. Its educational formats are based on the Four Cs model of learning: collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity. For example, when participants invent their own tools of the future as part of a workshop, they work together (collaboration), consult with each other (communication), make prototypes using everyday objects (creativity) and consider what effects their objects might have on future society (critical thinking).

“The Four Cs represent an attempt to rethink school and learning under the conditions of digitality, that is, in a world where humans and technology are bonded. They are geared towards creating skills that pupils can use to react to the challenges of our time,” says Dr Christian Engelbrecht, Head of Education and Participation at Futurium. "With our workshops, we want to provide pupils with individual access to enable them to use digitality as an active tool.”

Futurium offers live online workshops for schools, which can be booked for individual classes, as well as free online workshops for everyone. Lots of ideas and tutorials for students and those interested in learning are available on our website under the keyword #FuturiumSchule.

The three online workshops at a glance:

1. Tools of the Future: Technologies for a Sustainable World

New technologies will shape our future to a significant degree. How can we use them to address the challenges of the future? In this three-hour workshop, primary school children (Years 4 to 6) respond to concrete questions with their own imaginative solutions for creating a sustainable world. With the help of idea boards, they turn their visions into short films.

2. Music of the Future: Motion Tracking with Sound Design

In this three-hour workshop, pupils in Years 7 to 13 take a look behind the scenes of motion tracking and learn to programme their own interactive installation. By means of the programming language Scratch, they transform their own movements into sounds.

3. senseBox: City of the Future

In this three-hour workshop, the senseBox, a DIY measuring station for environmental data, is introduced as an example of a citizens’ science project. Pupils in Years 7 to 13 learn what data is, how to collect and interpret it, and why open data is important for political participation and societal development. In their own project, pupils use the programming language JavaScript to visualise live data from the openSenseMap and present it graphically in a creative way.

Participation in the workshops

The digital workshops for school classes are structured in such a way that they are individually adaptable and suitable for all types of schools. They invite pupils to engage in a playful exploration of the future, supporting them in understanding the future as an opportunity that they can help shape in a conscious and self-determined manner. The workshops are held on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 10:00 to 13:00. The workshops are put on pause during the Berlin school holidays. Taking part costs 5 euros per pupil. Further information and booking at: https://futurium.de/de/workshops