Healthy Environment & Life Planning for KIDS (HelpKIDS)

Collaborative learning; healthy children; life-long learners, hands-on methods; children as educators; children empowerment; creative community; social capital; environmental consciousness.

1. Problem: The conventional methods of classroom education in both developed and developing countries often miss out on the opportunity to develop children as a life-long learner. Theoretical learning disengages learners from real life solutions, as children often fail to understand the deeper connections between life and environment, relying on the virtual world manifested by the electronic platform for both education and recreations.

2. Solution tested: The project HELP-KIDS (Healthy Environment and Life Planning for KIDS) is a global initiative, applied in Scotland and Spain, which was originally applied in Bangladesh titled Architecture for Kids (ARCH.KIDS) at BRAC University (http://www.bracu.ac.bd/academi... ) founded by the applicant. Arch.KIDS is running regularly in Bangladesh while HELP-KIDS is growing in Scotland and in Spain using coordinated innovative learning methods where learners become educators by flip classroom method in workshop sessions. This is an innovative tool and one that brings learners closer to the problems by partnering with the instructor using subject of health and well-being and environmental issues. Such as, a) challenging in 'planting, growing and caring trees as the kids grow'' - learning the significance of the environment by loving, caring and growing trees https://www.flickr.com/photos/bracuniversity/sets/72157685099260294; b) 'my dream street' - learning the significance of walkable streets https://www.flickr.com/photos/bracuniversity/albums/72157684750241904; c) 'greening campus (http://www.rgu.ac.uk/news/citi...) - each of these learning methods with ambitious educational objectives were designed in collaboration with the kids and teachers, which enables flipping the teaching responsibility to children who acquire knowledge through hands-on experience and by solving the problem. 'Greening Campus' ( received professional notable under educational initiative category in Core77, New York in 2012 (http://www.core77designawards.... )

3. The global significance of the solution: The flip method of 'learners as educators' have successfully been applied in one developing country (Bangladesh) and two developed countries (Scotland, The United Kingdom, and Spain). The merit of the pedagogical projects has been evaluated after the session, which points to the importance of elevating the confidence of the learners to a level of educators for a life-long learner and to appreciate the importance of global issues of environment, health, and their connections. The two initiatives (ArchKIDS and HelpKIDS) are affiliated with higher education institutions having in-kind support since 2004. These initiatives have a bigger ambition of linking to primary and secondary school curriculum as a special workshop series. The core objective is to gradually empower children to engage in the discussion on environment and health, act responsibly while educating themselves through building self-confidence as life-long learners, and to contribute to the wider community by dissemination of good practice. ArchKIDS and HelpKIDS are no-profit initiative. 

HelpKIDS and ArchKIDS are two parallel innovative pedagogic approaches for children. These are focused on helping young educators  as life-long learners. Using hands-on community engagement tool called – ‘Stitching Urban Vision’ (SUV), we apply the notion of negotiation, assembling collective urban visions, building confidence and capacity buildings for young learners. SUV is a method that uses both hand drawing and narration using the physical setup as well as IPAD drawing tools. By using urban live issues and using the community engagement methods, SUV creates a platform for building an agreed vision for fulfilling the target environmental objectives.

Technology is our main aim. Currently, we use only hand drawn and narrative approaches and IPAD access for young learners to use SUV method. IPAD is used for collaborative learning only. Future ideas are to design an apps for young learners to use as a creative platform to communicate with their peers and access, alters and accepts (AAA) urban issues.

Technology is our target and would be the integral to the learning method.

The SUV will be designed as a user-friendly app. For next 12 months, the target will be to invest time and resources for designing SUV by evaluating our 12 years of community engagement methods and extract outcome to design the collaborative apps.

The vision for the next five years will be structured around a) Building knowledgeable, confident and motivational young generations by equipping them with the ethos of life-long learners; b) to be confident as a contributor to the social change and c) to be confident to understand the value of social innovation and social capital. The SUV apps will be the companion to this long-term process.

After launching the first SUV apps, this will be first tested in Scotland, and then it will be available widely as opensource apps to wider educational institutes. By doing so, we will be able to have wider participation. Future apps will be imptoved as a shared game platform, similar to SIM City or Minecraft (a hybrid of two),  but capable of using google map and postcode of the chosen neighbourhood and overlay the collective visions of urban improvement.

100 children each year in both developing and developed countries (Bangladesh, Spain, and Scotland UK). But we haven't created apps for them to use. But currently, we use SUV techniques to generate narratives and collective visions. Currently one of the primary schools has started redesigning their playground with the help of collaborative approach and using SUV methods. Incremental development is taking place in every other month.

We have the internet to contact the local schools and the City Council Education Committee to try out the new apps to be integrated into the Scottish Currciculum of Excellence framework. This is under considerations and as soon as we have the apps, we will test it in one of the local schools. The population cohort will be mainly the school children due to the fact that they will be the future leaders of any societal changes. 

Our team members have community engagement skills, computer skills, and design skills. They come from School of Computing Science, Art School, Architecture School, Applied Social Science School.

We aim to be not-for-profit but affiliated with the higher education institution. There are no immediate commercialization objectives. We have targets for social benefits and all costs incurred will be shared by stakeholders and research funding organizations leading to the design of apps and other social innovation activities. But the element of revenue generation should be evaluated in terms of in-kind support and social benefits calculations. Such as, delivering social innovations strategies can lower down the social burden of health ailments by turning sedentary youth into active society. This can be translated into economic benefits by lowering longer-term health cost.

We are aiming to have Solve as our knowledge partner and to get help on developing the SUV apps. This will be helpful for our long-term target for generating learning tools for school children and to involve children in community engagement initiatives.

We expect SOLVE to help in providing opportunity, technical assistance in terms of providing support for Researcher to design apps and to test it to local schools in the USA and UK.