Investigate

In the future classroom, students are encouraged to discover for themselves; they are given the opportunity to be active participants rather than passive listeners. In the Investigate zone, teachers can promote inquiry- and project-based learning to enhance students' critical thinking skills. The flexible furniture supports this concept, and the physical zone can be reconfigured quickly to enable work in groups, pairs, or individually. New technology gives an added value to the research by providing rich, versatile and real-life data, and also by providing tools to examine and to analyse.

Key points for Investigate

• Developing critical thinking skills: students learn how to find quality resources and how to manage information.
• Developing problem-solving skills: students have a goal or a challenge to resolve. The challenge/question is set by the students themselves. This builds on their strengths, potentials and preferences.
• Learners become active researchers: research across varied media (text-based, video, audio, images, results of experiments, numbers, etc.) is the basis of the classroom activity. Investigation can take place by reading, observing, conducting science experiments, organising surveys, using robots, etc.
• Encouraging cross-curricular projects: learning across disciplines helps learners to analyse and understand things from multiple perspectives.
• Learning by exploring: students can construct models, test ideas and evaluate the results themselves. The technology provides different ways for the learners to get involved through hands-on learning activities.
• Connecting with the outside world: rather than working within the artificial boundaries of a school subject, the teachers and students select real-life challenges and data to investigate.

Useful equipment

• Data loggers
• Robots
• Microscopes
• Online laboratories
• 3D models