Over the past year, Math4Sustainability has built a growing family of exhibits — hands-on, playable, and each one wrapped around a real environmental dilemma. Now comes the stage where these exhibits leave the workshop and meet the people who will actually use them: teachers.

This autumn, our consortium begins rolling out Green Living Labs — one in each of our five partner countries — and we wanted to explain what they are, and why we think they matter.

What is a Living Lab?

Picture a room with secondary school teachers, an environmental scientist, and a mathematics or science museum professional, all working around the same table. That’s a Math4Sustainability Living Lab. It isn’t a training session where teachers sit and listen — it’s a working session where they help shape the material itself.

Each Living Lab is built around one of the project’s exhibits. The session opens not with a slide deck but with the exhibit itself: something to touch, test and question. From there, the group works through four stages that will be familiar to anyone who has run a good classroom project — first naming the dilemma, then designing a response, then testing and comparing different solutions, and finally reflecting on what was learned and why it matters beyond the room.

Why bring in outside experts?

Because a fishing quota, a wind farm siting decision, or a question about circular economies deserves more than a textbook answer. An environmental scientist can ground the discussion in real evidence. A museum professional can explain why an exhibit is designed the way it is, and how it could be adapted further. And teachers bring what no one else in the room can: knowledge of what will actually work with their own students, in their own classrooms.

Everyone leaves having shaped something together — not received a finished resource, but built one.

What happens to the results?

Every idea, question and piece of feedback from each Living Lab feeds directly into the project’s upcoming E-Guide: a free teaching resource that will let any educator, anywhere, run these same activities with their own classes.

Want to take part?

If you’re a secondary school teacher, an environmental scientist, or a museum or science-centre educator interested in joining a Math4Sustainability Living Lab in your country, get in touch with your national partner — details are on our Partners page.

Stay tuned to our social channels as dates for each Living Lab are confirmed.