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A concept that teaches outside the lesson
Koumio® is an educational concept where learning happens outside the lesson — in the time children spend standing in the corridor anyway.
What happens once you hang a Koumio® board up
01
It catches attention
A Koumio® board looks like a small scientific sculpture — clean execution, an unusual shape, honest materials. Children, teachers and visitors all ask the same question: what is that? And they stop.
02
Instinctive play by hand
Handles and grips invite touch. The child doesn't yet know what's in front of them, but is already turning, tipping and sliding — purely on instinct.
03
Play raises a question
The youngest children stay with the pleasure of playing. With older ones there comes a moment when they realise that what their hands are doing means something — and they start looking for it.
04
The experiment gives the answer
A Koumio® board answers with a phenomenon, not with text. The child tries the principle out with their own hands and discovers, say, why the Moon looks different every night, or how movement and force are related.
05
Questions open a conversation
Anyone who can't work out the answer asks. So a Koumio® board naturally opens a conversation between children and with their teacher — it works as a peer-to-peer learning tool.
Autonomous learning
Plenty of things compete for children's attention during a lesson, and there isn't much of it to go round. We don't compete for it.
A Koumio® board occupies a different kind of time — the time a child spends waiting for lunch, walking back from the gym or standing by the vending machine. Nobody plans anything for that time, and the child is there every single day. That is what we call the natural circuit of attention.
So learning doesn't happen on top of everything else. It happens in a space your school has had all along.
No preparation, no supervision, no maintenance
The objection we hear most often from head teachers isn't “how much does it cost”. It's “who is going to look after it”. The answer is nobody.
No extra work for teachers
A Koumio® board starts working the moment you hang it on the wall. Nothing to prepare. It works on its own, even if the staff room never hears about it.
Nobody has to guard it
A Koumio® board needs no special handling and doesn't belong behind glass. It is designed for children to play with it without an adult watching.
It needs no maintenance
No fragile or loose parts, no cables, no updates, no batteries.
If you do want to bring a Koumio® board into a lesson, complete teaching materials are ready for both inquiry-based and conventional teaching. It's an offer, not an obligation.
One thing left — to come and look at yours
The proposal is free of obligation and takes us an hour on site.
A Koumio® board is the dark knight
In the lower years a Koumio® board does work whose result you won't see for several years. It prepares children for material they'll meet in the upper years.
A Koumio® board in a lower-school corridor works exactly like that. A child walks past it for years and plays with it. Once they learn to read, they find out what they've actually been playing with. Nobody ever tells them they're learning.
So when they come to Pythagoras' theorem, the motion of celestial bodies, photosynthesis and the greenhouse effect in year eight, they aren't starting from zero. The hands-on experience is the foundation the knowledge sits on. One sentence is enough — “remember it? Go and have another look at the Koumio® board by the canteen” — and the class knows what you mean.
„Letting children meet upper-school material from year one won't win you an award straight away. But when your children aren't starting from zero a few years later, and are well prepared for that material — that will be your quiet success."
A Koumio® board doesn't select
A Koumio® board has no entry level a child has to meet. Each child takes away as much as they can carry that day — and that's all there is to it.
At the Phases of the Moon Koumio® board, a girl with a mild intellectual disability described the relationship between the Earth and the Sun in her own words: “Like watching the sun from a car going round bends.” It wasn't a textbook definition. It was her way of grasping how two bodies relate — and it worked.
A gifted year-eight pupil at the same Koumio® board is working out why there isn't an eclipse at every full moon. Both are standing at the same object. Both are reaching the potential they have right now.
„I got it!"
girl with a mild intellectual disability
„I was surprised I understood it."
„I had to use my brain."
„I was surprised physics could be fun."
Koumio® boards connect subjects
The Koumio® board is the carrier. The theme is the content — and that can be anything from the primary curriculum.
Photosynthesis
connects chemistry, biology, environmental education and engineering
Ohm's law
connects electricity and mechanics
Phases of the Moon
connects mechanics, gravity, the motion of celestial bodies, mathematics and biology
So your Koumio® zone doesn't belong only to the physicists, mathematicians and chemists. It belongs to every child and every teacher who wants to know more about the world we live in and the effect we have on it. We build the collection around what you tell us needs strengthening in the curriculum.
The thinking continues with a set of curiosity questions
Every Koumio® board carries a QR code. Behind it is a page offering everything that wouldn't fit into the object itself.
Dětem gives follow-up questions and solutions to the inquiry challenge — from simple ones to those an adult has to wrestle with too.
Vyučujícím gives a set of curiosity questions at different levels, and for selected Koumio® boards a teaching handbook, game books and inquiry notebooks to download.
Glossary
Koumio® board
An interactive object made of wood and steel, designed for public use. It shows one principle, which you try out with your own hands.
Koumio® zone
A considered corner of a school or institutional interior, fitted with several Koumio® boards that together form a coherent whole.
Autonomous learning
Learning that happens freely, at a time that suits the child and in a way they choose. Without a teacher present, without time pressure and without the fear of failing.
Learning simply ··· in passing
Learning in informal time and space. Unorganised, unsupervised, without the child realising they are learning.
Curiosity questions
Questions to think about. They set the main inquiry challenge and lead to applying what you've found. Follow-up questions for going deeper sit behind the QR code.
Peer-to-peer and intergenerational learning
One child explaining a principle to another. Or a child working at a Koumio® board alongside an adult or an older person. At a Koumio® board, group learning starts by itself.
Want a Koumio® zone at your place too?
Tell us what we're working with. We'll come and look, and put together a proposal.