Learning environment of the future
What happens when children get the opportunity to learn by using their curiosity, investigate, cooperate and build physical solutions? And what happens to the teachers and pedagogues who simultaneously have their mindset challenged in relation to learning? That is what Billund Builds is all about.
Billund Builds invites both children and adults to work with creative, collaborative and experimental processes under a shared overall theme with the purpose of developing qualifications of the future, as well as promoting an interdisciplinary learning community that both children and adults can have an effect on.
Regardless of the theme, the central point of Billund Builds is to create a framework in which the children can co-create playful, creative, and experimental learning processes. The starting point is the understanding of the fact that children learn best when they are engaged, are challenged, work creatively with the challenges and create their own solutions.
Billund Builds is a hands-on project where children and adults build and create together, and where both children and professionals gain practical knowledge and understanding of how they can use learning through play in everyday life.
The ambition of Billund Builds is not just to create a shared project week across year groups and institutions across the whole municipality, but also to create a platform for the exchange of experiences between professionals and for documentation and evaluation of experiences and methods.
And it’s also a concrete and tangible way of working with the vision of Capital of Children as the place where children learn through play and are creative world citizens.
Billund Builds is driven by CoC Playful Minds in collaboration with Billund Municipality and the LEGO Foundation.
In 2020, the theme was Billund Builds Creative World Citizens. Children from all of Billund Municipalities' schools took part in defining what a creative world citizen is. The theme was examined and expanded locally in all of the daycare institutions and schools in Billund from the autumn of 2019 until the summer of 2020.
In 2019, the theme was Billund Builds Development. The theme was created and chosen by a community of kindergarten and school children in Billund Municipality. In week 5, the theme 'development' was explored, and the support for participation in Billund Builds was the largest since 2015. More than 4000 children and adults from the municipality's schools and public day-care facilities were part of Billund Builds Development, and during the week, they worked on a wide array of themes, including personal development, local historical development, historical development, school development, the journey of food from animal to table, and the body's development.
In 2018, the theme was Billund Builds Nature. The approach to the theme was creative, and the children were included in the processes from idea development to product development. The result was a wide spectrum of projects from animal life to the cultivation of herb gardens in windows and recycling materials that do not belong in nature.
In 2017, the shared theme was Billund Builds Energy. The participating children and adults' interpretations ranged wide from the body's energy and physical development to chain reactions and kinetic energy for wind- and water power.
In 2015, Billund Builds was launched as a pilot project with the theme Billund Builds Music. All participating children worked with sound, music, poetry, rhythm, and of course building instruments.