Projektum
Developed for Vejle Municipality
Challenge
Innovation, project development and entrepreneurship have become a part of the school curriculum in multiple Danish municipalities. It’s meant to promote children’s democratic development, understanding of citizenship and responsibility in the community – and then it’s of course means to train their innovation skills.
But everything about innovation and project development can seem big and unmanageable to start – also for the most innovation-trained adults. So how do we teach kids and youngsters what’s needed for developing projects in their local area to ensure a better local environment they want to keep living in?
Solution
The solution became the board game Projektum where students in Danish 6th and 7th grades are starting projects to develop their local area.
Here they’re playing as three students from a local school who has had the idea for a project and are now planning how to bring it to life. The players must collaborate against the game to make decisions about how they’ll jointly manage the project. At the end of the game, the students’ project is evaluated based on their creativity, the practical stuff, and the support for the project.
Projektum is built on the Danish DIN model where innovation and project development are separated into six phases: the innovation room, front end, concept development, development, implementation, and roll-out. The model promotes better and more innovative processes and results that actually have a chance to be implemented.
Result
Projektum was developed and launched at the beginning of 2022. Vejle Municipality is now using the game to increase children’s process understanding and show them that it takes a collective effort to reach the goals for a project and that they’re more than able to take the first steps by themselves.
