The Better Design Foundation was founded with the goal of shifting the culture of education from the traditional instructional model, to a collaborative and exploratory model. The foundation develops proprietary products, and design modern active-learning classrooms to better engage students while addressing their social and emotional needs - helping create independent learners today, and empathetic leaders tomorrow. Classrooms in affordable and corporation schools are largely cramped, which is difficult to reorganize and unfit for the presentation of lessons requiring any physical activity. Many classrooms lack natural light and ventilation which are critical to the learning environment from the view of being conducive to better learning and promoting student health. Studies show that the learning environment can impact learning by up to 25% within an academic year, and also influence the social and emotional needs of students by up 50%.
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The Better Design Foundation (TBDF) has partnered with FRDC to intervene in 4 underserved classrooms in Vijaynagar area in Bengaluru to demonstrate the real-world impact of the learning environment on improving student social, emotional and academic outcomes. The TBDF team in conjugation with designers from FRDC conducted sessions introducing the concept of design thinking to students, to better understand their needs using the Feel, Imagine, Do and Share framework. Student and educator voice were distilled into a vision of a flexible, durable and interactive learning space. Execution of our shared vision required the design of proprietary furniture which was prototyped by 6MM with inputs from the FRDC team, and fabricated by SH Industries. The final product was an individual workstation that promoted creative collaboration, communication and ownership within students.
The completed projects, called CleverClassrooms have received overwhelmingly positive feedback from educators, administrators and students alike, and TBDF hopes to intervene in 30 classrooms in the first half of 2020, supported by the design team at FRDC!
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