Building an intelligent classroom accessible to all teachers and students

The school enriched the material and technical base and built an intelligent classroom with mobile equipment that can be used anywhere and by anyone. The intelligent classroom has several separate zones:

• The Innovation Skills Area, where students and teachers have nine Chromebooks and access to the “Intel Skills For Innovation (SFI)” starter pack of ready-made lessons. The starter pack contains 70 lessons (21 of which are in Bulgarian), covering 140 hours of content in different subjects, which can be taught virtually or in a traditional learning environment, and through which it is possible to effectively integrate innovation skills into the existing curriculum. This package gives teachers the opportunity to learn about ready-made materials and build an innovative learning environment inspired by technologies that develop skills of the future in students. The teachers also received training to implement Intel's package of ready-made lessons. Inspired by the new way of teaching, the teachers started creating integrated learning content themselves and conducting integrated STEM lessons.
• A frontal talk and presentation area, where students and teachers have an interactive display with a built-in OPS module and Mozabook software, which expands the learning toolkit with a variety of illustrations, animations, over 1200 3D scenes, interactive worksheets, game activities and exercises, spectacular interactive content and built-in, skills-developing, illustrative and virtual laboratory applications that help increase students' interest, enable consideration and research, acquisition of knowledge, skills and competences.
• A project work area in which the students have the opportunity to take drone shots with a 360-degree camera, use a 3D scanner and process captured and scanned materials on a suitable laptop. This area is used both in the regular hours until noon and in the afternoon in the classes of interest activities. The newly acquired technique is used by students to implement their learning projects placed in different subjects. During this school year, students from V, VI and VII grades are extremely motivated to work in the club "School Media", where they reflect the activities at school and conduct interviews with people of interest to them. The laptop bought under the project "Learning from the Extremes" is used daily for editing captured videos by different teams of students that are published on the school YouTube channel.
• An experiment and programming area, where in both regular hours to noon and interest classes after lunch, students acquire skills in managing programmable devices, such as MakeyMakey and Microbit, learning the visual block programming language Scratch and the Python language. A "Workshop for Parents" was also organized, during which parents, together with their children, worked with the programmable boards.

To ensure equal access to the improved educational base and infrastructure for students and teachers, a schedule for the use of the equipment was prepared. This access to infrastructure and digital resources facilitated the development and/or enhancement of numerous practices and activities of the school, such as:

• Integration of open practices and sharing of good pedagogical experience;
• Implementation of interdisciplinary student project assignments;
• Carrying out extracurricular activities of interest. Specifically, five clubs have been formed, three of which are in the field of "digital creativity";
• Participation of students at Olympiads and competitions and for the first time the students participated in the National Competition in "Computer Modelling"