As we have seen before, it is possible to include playful learning activities in order to deepen students' knowledge in an active way. In some 8th grade technology classes, different groups of students were asked to explore certain basic concepts in robotics while being encouraged to use syringes and plastic tubes to build simple hydraulic robots and devices that can be developed as games.

We regularly encourage students to use 4DFrame to increase their knowledge of geography as they are supported to build models of different landmarks such as the Tower of Pisa, the Eiffel Tower, a Cathedral of their hometown, or the Atomium in Brussels.

To provide an example that is well known in schools throughout the world that can be used as a sustainable learning teamwork exercise, we will epitomise with what has been termed the Egg Parachute Challenge. For a few years we have had a tradition of carrying out an egg parachute challenge, where the students have to land an egg safely from the third floor of the school building.

The students at our school have already been using 4DFrame in their classes for a few years. As educators, we always strive to further develop our students’ general knowledge, culture, and competence level, partly with the use of 4DFrame material, which arguably offers an enhanced active and hands-on learning experience. Furthermore, the Swedish school curriculum actively encourages teachers to use a more holistic approach when teaching, which can in many ways be facilitated by the use of 4DFrame or other teaching materials.

The competition Spänningssökarna is structured in such a way that the participants must answer certain questions or specifications regarding queries such as: What might future energy solutions look like, and students are encouraged to come up with new ways to use renewable energy sources and new ways of living as energy efficiently as possible. The theme varies from year to year, but for example, the 2019 competition’s theme was “The Connected City”. It was encouraging the students to reflect upon how they might imagine the cities of the future to take shape and how to make them as energy efficient as possible. The contest was divided into six phases:

In the Swedish national curriculum, each term there is time allocated for something called “students’ choice”. The students are invited to participate in the creation of different pedagogical activities that must be related to any part of the curriculum. Each student’s elected activity needs to be associated with at least one school subject, and there needs to be student input – that is, teachers’ design learning activities that are suited to some of the students' requests.

The pedagogical approach termed Universal Design for Learning instigates three principles for universal accessibility for learning:

An efficient way to promote transdisciplinary and holistic learning is to use several languages simultaneously using immersive language learning. We must remember that a substantial part of the world's population is fluent in more than one language. Furthermore, while using a collaborative approach to planning, a work team which might comprise teachers of different origins and specialisations can contribute to this pedagogical added value by making sure to use concepts from a multitude of languages. Just like in many medieval schools of Europe that taught Latin and ancient Greek while most students were already fluent in their vernacular language, or as in the case of the colonial empires of the 19th century who were imposing their language on their colonies of Africa, South East Asia, India, and other parts of the world, where native speakers were de facto educated in a multilingual environment. Even in the most contemporary monolingual countries of the world, it is almost guaranteed that the students will receive part of their education in English, as this language has become the new ‘Lingua Franca’ of the world in the last few decades.

From a purely philosophical standpoint, there are many different ways of defining the act of acquiring knowledge. It is imperative to clearly identify the different epistemological currents regarding the study of pedagogy in order to better situate integrative, active and sustainable learning within the philosophical underpinnings of educational research. The various theories of knowledge assimilation and the critical study of the modes of knowledge acquisition are based on epistemological foundations which can relate to several varied aspects: the ways of producing knowledge, the fundamental aspects of what constitutes knowledge as well as the dynamics of knowledge production.

Blended learning is in fact nothing revolutionary. It is a progression, where traditional methods step by step embrace the integrative aspects previously described, as well as the constantly evolving digital learning tools, in increasingly developing and varied learning environments.

Although the world-encompassing pandemic outbreak in 2020 caused widespread disruption all over the world, school leaders and teachers in Sweden found themselves almost completely exempt from this alteration during 2020 as schools remained open throughout this difficult period for all Swedish students up to the age of 16, not just those of essential workers. Notwithstanding debates about the strategy adopted by the Swedish Public Health Agency to flatten the curve of rising infections without a complete lockdown, schools all around the country quickly adapted to a new reality, where voluntary individual confinement forced teachers to develop different hybrid teaching methods, such as blended learning, where distance teaching and in-school learning took place simultaneously.

Throughout recent times, where many people have been working from home, many office workers reported being more productive at work while being forced to work from their own homes, owing partly to spending less time commuting, but also as a result of a more effective use of time actually working. For some, remote working is just another day at the office, as thousands of workers, for example in the Netherlands, already benefited from the country’s astonishingly flexible work culture.

We would propose that there is no benefit in transforming our entire school systems into exclusively computer-based distance learning institutions; rather we would propose a much more flexible system going forward, where students and teachers perhaps met on fewer occasions and in smaller ‘bubbles’ or groups. Research has shown that an optimal group size for humans to perform at a collectively most advantageous level might be something like a combination of about eight to 12 people.