Kids grow up fast these days, but even so, visitors to this year's Farnborough air show might have been forced into a double take. Away from the main arena where the fancy stuff flies low ahead, are the stands where the real business takes place.

This is where the multi-million pound deals are schmoozed by the suits: it was also, this year, the area where several groups of 11 and 12 year-old children spent a large part of the air show asking difficult questions of the assembled ranks of executives and technicians. Remarkably, nothing was being bought and sold, and the only exchange was knowledge. Welcome to the launch of the massively ambitious new online learning project, Launchpad for Learning.

The Wavell School in Farnborough is a comprehensive with a mixed intake and more than its fair share of social problems. But it has a dedicated teaching staff and it's in the centre of the military heartland, which always seems to attract some of the finest specialist, technical and scientific support to the region. A fact not lost - or wasted - on Spokey Wheeler, Wavell's headteacher.

Just over a year ago, Wheeler met the director-general of British Aerospace Systems to enlist his support for the school's application for specialist science and technology status - which was duly awarded earlier this month. The conversation rapidly shifted to talk of what the classoom of the future might look like, and the idea was formed of presenting a model of the school of the future at the airshow.

Wheeler roped in his local education authority; John Davies, the learning adviser for Dudley who created the online Dudley challenges; the arts and science body, NESTA; and the Society of British Aerospace Companies together with a raft of other big-name hi-tech companies, and Launchpad was born. The benefits of having them as partners stretches well beyond the financial. "Our learning resources are not just compiled by teachers," Wheeler says, "but by some of the finest scientific minds in the country."

For the launch of the initiative at Farnborough, where groups of children had both to use online research and ask questions of various companies at the show to solve problems, Launchpad for Learning was able to call on Marsha Ivins, the astronaut, to deliver the inaugural lecture. Similar big names in the scientific world are being lined up for future events.

Launchpad for Learning plans to go live, not just nationwide, but globally at the ICT in Education BETT show in January. For the pilot launch at Farnborough, schoolchildren from Poland and Belarus took part, and the online materials are being translated into several languages, including French and German.

The scheme is essentially an online science and technology teaching resource. Schools will be able to access from the Launchpad website a series of challenges, geared to different age groups, that have been designed by both teachers and members of the wider scientific community.

Each challenge will bear some relevance to the national curriculum, though its primary goal is rather to be fun and informative, and can be solved through a combination of teamwork, practical experimentation and online research. For instance, at the Farnborough air show, students were asked to work out how many people could stand on the wing of a jet: the answer could only be calculated by first asking the makers of the aircraft for the wing dimensions and then working out the size of the average 12-year-old's footprint.

The next few challenges, which will include problems based on the QinetiQ balloon flight, are being prepared, along with a variety of different online and public events. To enable the school to deliver this initiative to its own pupils, the Wavell is building a small science block to house the necessary hardware. "We don't see the future just in terms of PCs," Wheeler points out.

"We envisage a mixture of laptops and video conferencing, together with the necessary ICT support."

All the materials produced will be geared to age-group, rather than the national curriculum, as the expectation is that people from all over the world will make use of this resource. And add to it.

"We hope that other schools and businesses from all over the world will want to join us as partners," Wheeler says. "Most schools do take seriously their responsibility to improve themselves, but for a long time during the 1990s we were responding to other people's innovations.

"Ultimately, this is potentially stultifying. Launchpad for Learning isn't a finite entity; rather it's an abstract concept for people to use how they want." Some abstract concept.


By John Crace