Step 2. Challenges design

School teams will work to pre-define three possible challenges and assess their viability. These challenges (or a fine-tuned conceptualisation of them) will be presented to students afterwards, so they can take part in the decision-making process to select the school challenge through a participatory process. The options are thus previously defined by the teachers, so a prefeasibility study of the opportunities and resources is taken into account. The selected challenge will be further developed in a later stage.

Brainstorming: finding four big challenges

Teachers will participate in a brainstorming dynamic to come up with challenges. They will be asked to think of up to four big challenges and hypothetical contributions to them. Possible challenges will be named as “Challenge 1”, "Challenge 2”, etc.

Testing our first ideas: Selection of two possible challenges

The selection will be based on a checklist for the design of challenge-based learning courses. This framework is inspired by the one by Van den Beemt et al. (2022) for analysing the variety of challenge-based learning characteristics within and between components in an academic curriculum. Questions have been defined based on the experience of the team in project-based learning and service-learning to achieve an adequate selection of pupil-led projects schools.

Teachers will score the four challenges (Challenge 1, Challenge 2, etc.) in Table 2 to obtain the two selected ones⁠—i.e., the two that will be discussed by students so that they choose one⁠—

Table 2: Checklist to score up to four big challenges. Note: In the four columns on the right, the word ‘Challenge’ has been abbreviated as ‘Cha.’. [1] The project can be extracurricular. However, planning the project within the curriculum is recommended in order to involve the higher number of students.subjects?

Pre-design of one challenge

Teachers will define the basic elements for the Top-one challenge (the challenge that scored higher in Table 2), following the scheme:

• The challenge (it can be helpful to formulate it as a question)

• Target groups (beneficiaries)

• Other actors

• Final product(s)

• Subjects involved

• Curriculum content covered (if any; the project can be extracurricular. However, integrative the project as a curricular interdisciplinary project is recommended)

• Competences covered

• Pupils grouping and organization

• Tasks to be done

• Assessment plan

• Necessary resources (materials, spaces, ICTs)

• Diffusion and connections