Of course, we brought our new-found bit of fun, our Virtual Reality glasses, to Japan last week. Great to be able to invite the audience at NIERs seminar of school facilities to take a virtual tour of the new Craft & Design rooms we have created for Roskilde. A popular treat during the conference break. Much to our surprise ICT in Japanese schools and the system as a whole is close to absent compared with Denmark. 

We also learned from that over the next few years almost every school in Japan will be rebuilt or improved to withstand earthquakes – a necessity in Japan but nonetheless a gigantic investment in the main structures of the buildings. At the same time, many rural schools face the challenge of very low student numbers with a disproportionately high number of teachers to cover subject areas – and many of these schools have an extreme surplus of classrooms. Thus school mergers are being looked into, but as in most places, this is not too popular. Not easy challenges to tackle… 

At the conference, Pia and Lene shared the stage with professor Itoh Shunsuke and professor Satoru Nagasawa who both gave very interesting accounts of the development of Danish school architecture and space planning. Interesting to see “Dansk Byggeforskningsinstitut” and several Danish schools mentioned among Japanese characters…