What would schools look like if kids could design them themselves? We challenged the students at Global Maker Day to build their dream schools with CoSpaces — and got smiling school buildings and candy making class.

Sit still, listen and copy these lines from the blackboard?

Fortunately, this is not what school looks like nowadays. Many students get room to discuss, experiment and express themselves in class.

Global Maker Day was a great example of how creative, innovative and hands-on education can be. On October 25th 2016, students and teachers from the US and across the world got together virtually to share their experiences with being creative. The event showed: The Maker Movement has long entered the classroom.

You can still watch the whole Global Maker Day on YouTube

Schools that let young people be creative and collaborate around the globe — isn’t that all students could ever dream of?

To find out the answer to this question, we gave the kids at Global Maker Day a challenge: Build the school of your dreams.

If schools were designed by kids, they’d be fun

Several classes took up this challenge and, using the VR tool CoSpaces, created virtual models of how they would love to learn.

Thanks to virtual reality, the kids could not only build their dream schools but even take a stroll around their grounds.

So if you let kids build their own schools what would they look like? We didn’t get one answer to this question but many imaginative, daring and quirky suggestions.

However, there is one thing that these schools would all have in common: You’d have fun there!

Introducing: Trampoline tricks and unicorn care class

Forget Maths, Biology and English! These students from Sunnyhills School in Pakuranga, NZ, came up with much better subjects.

We’d love to enlist for one of their unicorn care classes, study how to make candy or get some exercise with trampoline tricks.

Hear about their curriculum in this video:

A school that smiles

It’s great if school makes you smile. Sam’s school is even better: It also smiles itself.

The 8th grader from Lake Shore Middle School in Angola, USA, designed a school that is set on a private tropical island. This isolation, however, does in no way interfere with the internet connection. In the building complexes on the island students can, for example, learn about film editing. A nice detail: When you look at the school from above, it looks like a smiling face.

If you want to explore Sam’s dream school yourself, click this link.