Open is a verb.
Open Minds teaches young people to use technology on problems that matter: real societal challenges, investigated properly, built for real people. Technology education that starts with why.
Open Minds teaches young people to use technology on problems that matter: real societal challenges, investigated properly, built for real people. Technology education that starts with why.
Schools already teach technology. The requirement is met with kit-and-instructions projects: build a robot, build a remote-controlled car, build a chatbot. Students learn which lever to pull to get which output, and the box is ticked.
What that approach does not produce is engagement. Research for The Disengaged Teen (Anderson and Winthrop, 2025) describes a majority of teenagers moving through school in "passenger" mode: present, compliant, and switched off. The cost is a generation trained to follow instructions in a world that needs people who can decide what is worth building.
One card describes a person. One adds a condition. One names an environment. The deal is random, and that is the point: the combinations are not the ones anyone would have chosen, and they are exactly the ones the world contains. The group's first task is not to build anything. It is to form a hypothesis about what is true for that person in that place, and then to find out whether it holds.
Three cards from the actual Open Minds deck, dealt the way a class would meet them.
"Perhaps Salia loves live music but rarely goes, because concert venues are designed to be navigated by sight: the entrance, the queue, the bar, the crowd between her and the stage."
That is a hypothesis. Before anyone builds anything, it gets tested: with the people who live with the situation, and against published research.
Students explore what the toolkit makes possible, and where its limits are, before meeting any challenge.
The card game deals a person, a condition and an environment. The group forms a hypothesis about what is true.
The hypothesis is tested against reality: with the people who live with the situation, and against the research.
With a hypothesis that has survived testing, the group designs and builds. Technical skills arrive in service of the project.
Prototypes meet real feedback and are revised. The record of change is itself a learning outcome.
The group communicates the journey: a film, a podcast, a presentation. Understanding is synthesised by teaching it to somebody else.
Assessment lives in the sixth phase. The artefact a group makes to communicate its journey is the evidence. Teachers tag the curriculum competencies it demonstrates, and a school sees something it cannot get from test scores: documented engagement, project by project, in the students' own work.
Open Minds grows by themed releases: new card packs, new courses and new hardware, each focused on a different societal challenge. Students do not work through a fixed syllabus; they meet a stream of problems and pursue the ones that matter to them.
We ask young people to design for real societal challenges, and the evidence that should ground their hypotheses exists. But it sits scattered across journals and databases, and finding the right papers, then mining each one for the few paragraphs that bear on your question, is research labour nobody should expect of a school student. A search engine returns superficial summaries; a general-purpose AI returns plausible-sounding claims with no sources.
Open Minds is a formal industry use case of GRAPHIA, the Horizon Europe project building a federated knowledge graph for the social sciences and humanities. A student's hypothesis is checked against the research corpus and comes back as a legible synthesis: what has been studied, what was found, where the evidence disagrees, and where there are gaps. When there is no evidence, the system says so. Students learn research craft; teachers get claims they can defend.
Read the published use case →A custom microboard running MicroPython, with stackable expansion hats for light, movement, gesture and audio, and a growing family of sensors. In classroom use in northern Sweden, now on its second hardware order.
Print-ready ideation decks in English, Swedish, Croatian, Albanian, Finnish and Portuguese, developed and tested with over 250 participants across five European countries.
The full six-phase experience runs in a browser today, including programming the physical board directly from the web page. A platform around it, with classes, evaluation and memberships, is in build.
A full educational philosophy and ontology governs what Open Minds is and what it requires, externally reviewed and continuously revised. The methodology is the product; everything else serves it.
Open Minds began as Design for Radical Inclusion, an Erasmus+ programme created at MTF Labs, the Swedish innovation lab whose community of around 9,000 innovators spans academia, industry, science and the arts. The concept and its philosophy, that exclusion lives in the design of the built environment rather than in the people it fails, were shaped by Michela Magas, and the programme ran with over 250 participants aged 18 to 30 across Sweden, Croatia, Portugal, Finland and Albania.
That programme produced the card game, the toolkit, a full curriculum and a free 110-page handbook. The venture you are reading about now takes that proven approach to schools, as a platform, and to every societal challenge it can reach.
Download the original handbook (PDF) →
