What´s Designathon Works and your role in it?
Designathon Works is an education organisation based in Amsterdam that empowers children to become creative problem-solvers and active designers of their future. We developed the Designathon Method, which combines design thinking, making and creativity around real-world social and environmental challenges. Children don’t just learn about these challenges; they imagine their own solutions, build prototypes and share their ideas.
I’m a Co-Founder of Designathon Works. My role ranges from developing programmes and partnerships to initiating international projects such as CircleCoLabs. A big part of my work is exploring how education can give children more agency and a stronger voice in shaping the world around them.
CircleCoLabs brings together Service-Learning, Maker Education, Design Thinking and Circular Economy. What is the main idea behind combining these approaches?
The main idea is to move from learning about sustainability to actually doing something with that learning.
Each approach contributes something different. Circular Economy gives us the challenge and a different way of thinking about resources and waste. Design Thinking helps students investigate problems and develop solutions. Maker Education allows them to turn ideas into something tangible, experiment and learn through making. And Service-Learning connects what happens in the classroom with real needs in the school or local community.
Together, they create a learning experience where students can understand a concept and a problem, imagine alternatives, make and test solutions, and contribute something meaningful to their community. That combination of learning, creativity and action is at the heart of CircleCoLabs.
What motivated Designathon Works to initiate CircleCoLabs, and what opportunity did you see for your work at Designathon Works?
CircleCoLabs grew very naturally out of our work at Designathon Works. For over a decade, we have seen what happens when children aged 7–12 are trusted with complex, real-world challenges: they are incredibly capable of generating ideas, making connections and imagining alternatives for a better world.
At the same time, we saw an opportunity to work with an older age group (CircleCoLabs is aimed at young people aged 10–16) and to go deeper into the process. We were particularly interested in exploring how Service Learning could strengthen young people’s agency by taking their ideas beyond the classroom and connecting them to real needs in their communities. Circular Economy was another natural fit: it has been one of the topics that children have responded to most enthusiastically in our previous work.
Developing CircleCoLabs together with both existing and new European partners also strengthens our network and brings together different expertise and perspectives.
For Designathon Works, it is an opportunity to further develop our methodology for use in schools and to learn directly from teachers and students. We are not simply bringing a ready-made method into classrooms. We are building, testing and improving the approach together across different European contexts.
What do you think makes CircleCoLabs particularly relevant for schools and educators today?
Schools are being asked to prepare young people for a world that is changing incredibly quickly. Sustainability, climate change, technology and social challenges are interconnected, and many of the problems students will encounter do not have one correct answer.
That means education also needs space for skills such as creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, experimentation and problem-solving. But importantly, CircleCoLabs is not only about developing skills. It gives students the experience that they can use those skills to influence something in the real world.
For educators, I think that is particularly valuable. CircleCoLabs provides practical ways to connect curriculum learning with sustainability and real challenges in the school or local community. The approach is cross-curricular and can contribute to multiple learning objectives at the same time, rather than becoming another separate topic that teachers need to fit into an already busy curriculum. At the same time, it gives students a much more active role in their own learning.
What was your most important learning from the Summer School of the Project in June ´26?
For me, one of the strongest learnings from the Summer School was how important the teacher experience is. We can develop frameworks, modules and lesson materials, but ultimately teachers have to be able to make them work with real students, in real classrooms, with limited time and resources.
Seeing educators work through the CircleCoLabs approach themselves made that very tangible. It reinforced the importance of learning by doing: teachers need to experience the process, experiment, make things, discuss, question and reflect. Not only receive instructions about how to teach it.
It also reminded me how valuable the diversity within the project is. Teachers approached the same challenges differently depending on their school, country and students. CircleCoLabs therefore needs to provide a strong common framework while remaining flexible enough for educators to adapt it to their own context. That is something I think will be particularly important as we move into the school pilots.
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