Students Design Intelligent Dollhouses

At Ikast Østre School in Ikast, students in an 8th-grade class were given the following assignment by their teacher: design and furnish a small dollhouse and create automatic lighting and heating in the house with sensors, which you will have to code yourselves.

The idea that students would build their own intelligent dollhouses had been in the works for a long time by Christian Lauridsen and his colleague at Ikast Østre School. Their dream was to create a teaching program for their 8th-grade class about intelligent homes. With a grant from the Villum Foundation's GRO pool, Christian Lauridsen and his colleague were able to bring the project to life. They received funding to purchase programming kits and sensors, as well as to get advice from the Center for Educational Resources on how the program could be structured.

Christian Lauridsen shares the students' experience of the project: "It has been a huge 'aha' moment to see the students work with the program. The teaching program was only planned to last for four weeks, but when it ended, the students didn’t want to stop, and they wished to continue working on the houses."

This was something Christian Lauridsen and his colleague had never experienced before when they had previously taught coding. Based on the students' enthusiasm, Christian Lauridsen and his colleague decided to extend the program to two months.

According to Christian Lauridsen, the reason for the project’s popularity was that all the students could easily see themselves in the program: "We saw students, who we would describe as weak in math, suddenly take the lead and show academic skills that, honestly, we hadn't seen in everyday classes." This gave Christian Lauridsen and his colleague something to reflect on.

At Ikast Østre School, they work with project-based learning, where the regular schedule is cleared, and teachers collaborate across subjects. Christian and his colleague plan to integrate the insights gained from this program into future classes. At the same time, they also plan to use the teaching program for other classes.