To address the pressing needs of education around the world, some innovations in the 2026 HundrED Global Collection are helping us expand our view of what education looks like, shifting learning beyond picture-book representations of schoolhouses. Klimaatspeelplaats, Theater Onlife and Masters of Trivia each challenge a core constraint of our traditional conceptions of the school environment: the physical scape, the experiential medium, and the digital landscape.
The 2026 HundrED Global Collection represents innovative solutions from around the world. This article features three such innovations from Belgium, the US and Italy.
Changing the Physical Environment
“We had a big problem,” says Cedric Ryckaert, the driving force behind Belgium’s Klimaatspeelplaats. “Any frustrations that happened during school came out during break time.” Bullying, fights, physical injuries: Cedric’s background in youth work told him that many of these could be addressed through play, but the playground at the Sint Paulus school where he teaches was drab and paved in large flagstones. This wide open space was primarily dedicated to playing football, which occupied most of the room and provoked lots of conflict: any student who wasn’t playing but wanted to get to what little green space there was would have to cross directly through the pitch. The students who weren’t playing football were bored - and found ways to entertain themselves. And just as conflicts in the classroom spilled into the school yard, they also found their way back inside, impacting instructional time.
Recognising that a change in scenery could make the difference, the school sought to reimagine what their grounds could look like. Taking advantage of a seed grant from the Flemish government and getting support from landscape architects, the students and the wider community, the paving stones were torn up and the 4000 m2 space was planted with resilient self-healing species - more than 40 trees, 150 shrubs, and natural materials. More than 2500 m2 are now devoted to different types of play, most open-ended and a bit on the risky side, and the yard is now home to a chicken coop, vegetable gardens, beehives and a weather station.
The Klimaatspeelplaats schoolyard encourages experiential learning and comfort with the outdoors.
Did it work? In short, yes - researchers found students engaging in more than 40 different types of play, many of them open-ended or risky, which builds important SEL skills like confidence, self-regulation, and creativity. The easy access to greenery has had an impact on classroom behavior too, with significantly reduced bullying rates, calmer students, and teachers with more freedom to trust the students. And, of course, this rich environment allows for new types of learning, too. “We learn about how long a meter is, and we can go out and check everything. It helps [the students] find different ways to reference it. The slide is two meters. The tower is three meters,” says Tine Ottevaera, a third grade teacher at the school. The space is an invitation to inquiry. Klimaatspeelplaats’s success has been a model for hundreds of other schools to transform, imparting important lessons on building strong partnerships and telling a good story in support of sustainable change.
Changing the Experiential Environment
When live connection was lost during the Covid pandemic, Meri Malaguti and Stefano Piermatteo of Italy’s AIDA Foundation found themselves wondering how to engage children who were now isolated and disconnected from school, from each other, and from the arts. How could theater work to overcome the challenges the pandemic presented - and could it help them overcome more systemic barriers as well? Theater allows for stories to be told, emotions and concepts to be explored, and worlds to be created in conjunction with the audience in the room. But without access to a local performing arts company or the funds to bring one to the school, students aren’t able to benefit from this important method of art.
Mixing live action, animation, and interactive quizzes, Teatro Onlife uses arts and pedagogy to deepen learning
Teatro Onlife was their solution: an interactive story led by a live actor in a studio, combined with animation and interactive quizzes that have real impact on how the plot develops. “Teatro Onlife is not just about streaming performances. It’s about redefining how audiences experience theatre, breaking down physical barriers, and creating a new hybrid form of storytelling,” Meri says. Building on the developmentally informed approach of children’s educational TV shows like Blue’s Clues and adding the structure of a choose-your-own-adventure book, each of Teatro Onlife’s stories creates a live, immediate experience rather than something passively consumed.
This experience is brought together with smart technology: AIDA has created a digital infrastructure that keeps students secure and allows them to engage with the actor: sharing ideas, giving feedback, and emoting alongside them. Students shape the story through quizzes, puzzles and choices, adding in an important element of agency to the script. The actor, meanwhile, brings it all to life, receiving aggregated feedback from the classroom about their collective decisions and advancing the plot without breaking the flow of the story. “We pursue a kind of video game approach. The princess may save herself or not. They may go get married. But that depends on the [class’s] decision,” says Stefano.
This hybrid model makes theatre accessible globally, with just a few actors able to have massive reach. It specifically aids disconnected or disadvantaged children, such as those in hospitals, by providing a way to connect with peers and participate in educational activities.
Changing the Cognitive Environment
There’s a “ticking time bomb in global education,” says Masters of Trivia’s founder, Dom Einhorn. It’s characterized by low motivation and student disengagement: the 3 second scroll bevahiour that characterises apps like TikTok and Instagram. This constant scream for attention, for the new and interesting, is antithetical to the aims of school: deep thought, breadth of content knowledge, and self-driven exploration. Masters of Trivia seeks to create a response to this challenge through gamified, low-barrier learning.
It’s about redefining how audiences experience theatre, breaking down physical barriers, and creating a new hybrid form of storytelling
Masters of Trivia is centered around multilingual bite-sized online quizzes - 10 to 15 questions per topic, with contextualization for those who are curious to learn more. It leverages the principles of gamification, active recall and spaced repetition to help students consolidate their knowledge from lessons - lessons from earlier that day or from long ago in their past.
Creating the variety of challenges required to reach that goal is no small task - Dom shares that they aim to be the Wikipedia of trivia, and they are leveraging the power of crowdsourcing to help them achieve that goal. Using AI to help them build and verify the content, they are able to massively scale the topics available to learners. This ensures that there is always another quiz to take, deepening knowledge and letting users follow their own curiosity.
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Large-Scale gamified competitions help drive learners to follow their curiousity and continue their learning
That loop - quiz, read up, and find the next step - is part of a self-improvement loop which allows users to retake quizzes, get hints, and be part of a global community through competitions, team events, and leader boards. Plus, it’s no-barrier to entry approach (not even requiring signup) means that it's accessible to everyone, letting users pit their knowledge bona fides against the entire world.
The Future of Learning Environments
Taken together, Klimaatspeelplaats, Theatre Onlife, and Masters of Trivia collectively represent the ways that the 2026 HundrED Global Collection is shifting educational paradigms, pushing beyond the traditional confines of classrooms and conventional structures. These innovative solutions underscore a global dedication to cultivating learning environments that are more adaptable, deeply engaging, and holistically enriching. Whether through the ingenious transformation of physical schoolyards into dynamic, nature-infused play spaces, the captivating delivery of interactive and immersive storytelling experiences via proprietary digital platforms, or the strategic application of AI and gamification to broaden and deepen knowledge acquisition, these initiatives offer compelling, tangible examples of how education is being fundamentally reshaped. This pivotal shift champions creativity, critical thinking, and universal accessibility, ensuring that learning is not only remarkably effective but also profoundly relevant and highly responsive to the diverse and evolving needs of students across the globe.
Learn more about the 2026 HundrED Global Collection and follow up on the 100 Days of HundrED campaign.
Working on an education innovation? Submit your innovation to the 2027 HundrED Global Collection call.
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