Interbiome Living Lab
The Inside Maker Living Lab brings the Cerrado and the Amazon together. Across diverse territories, children and educators transform their surroundings into living spaces for inquiry, experimentation, and co-creation—where science, nature, and ancestral knowledge meet.
From the Cerrado to the Amazon, diverse ways of knowing come together to co-create new futures.
The Inside Maker Living Lab invites organizations working with children in educational settings—across Brazil and around the world—to join a collaborative network that investigates real-world challenges and co-creates new pathways toward a more sustainable future.
The initiative connects children, educators, and researchers from diverse territories, creating opportunities to share knowledge, explore challenges together, experiment with solutions, and learn from different realities. Each place brings its own questions, culture, and way of seeing the world—and it is through these encounters that new possibilities can emerge.
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How can we co-create more sustainable communities where children, nature, and animals can thrive together?
This is the question guiding the Inside Maker Living Lab pilot at the Children of Tomorrow Educational Center, nestled in the countryside of Planaltina, in Brazil’s Federal District. The Center and its surroundings become a living landscape for inquiry and experimentation, where children, educators, families, researchers, and community members explore real-world challenges and co-create new possibilities.
The pilot is shaped by Inside Maker’s five dimensions: Awareness, Inquiry, Collaboration, Experimentation, and Co-creation. Stories and experiences first invite children to see their surroundings—and the many forms of life within them—with fresh eyes. From there, they investigate, ask questions, and develop hypotheses. Diverse perspectives and ways of knowing are brought together, while ideas take shape through experimentation and hands-on making.
Co-creation is where the other four dimensions come together. Storytelling, inquiry, relationships, and experimentation converge to bring something new into being: a solution, new knowledge, a new question, or a new way of understanding and transforming the place we share.
Challenges related to water, waste, food, biodiversity, play spaces, coexistence with animals, nature regeneration, and the responsible use of resources become meaningful opportunities for hands-on inquiry, creativity, and collective action.
Rather than simply teaching sustainability, the pilot creates opportunities to experience it in everyday life—starting small, learning from the results, and developing knowledge and solutions that can inspire other communities.
One territory. Five dimensions. Countless possibilities for co-creating tomorrow.
Our Co-creation Cycle
01. Awareness
Exploring and Understanding
03. Working Together
Understanding the Challenge
What happens: A story, experience, or real-life situation invites children to notice and engage with a challenge in their surroundings.
Approaches: Storytelling, group conversations, thought-provoking images and objects, sensory experiences, exploratory walks, and close observation of nature.
Outcomes: A shared understanding of the challenge, children’s initial perspectives, and the questions that begin to emerge.
02. Exploration
What happens: Children turn their curiosity into meaningful questions as they observe, explore, gather information, and develop hypotheses.
Approaches: Inquiry journals, drawings, photographs, maps, interviews, field observations, small-scale experiments, material collection, and guided research.
Outcomes: A guiding inquiry question, documented observations, initial hypotheses, and a deeper understanding of the challenge.
04. Hands-on Experimentation
Bringing Different Ways of Knowing Together
What happens: Children share their discoveries, bringing different perspectives and ways of knowing into the inquiry. They listen to one another, exchange ideas, and chart possible paths forward together.
Approaches: Co-creation circles, idea boards, collaborative maps, collective decision-making, workshops, exchanges between children, conversations with specialists, and connections with other learning environments.
Outcomes: A shared map of ideas, knowledge built together, and a selection of promising solutions to explore.
Bringing Ideas to Life
What happens: Selected ideas are brought to life as children build, test, observe the results, and refine their solutions.
Approaches: Hands-on making, prototyping, recycled and natural materials, experimentation kits, solution design, testing, observation tools, and before-and-after documentation.
Outcomes: A working prototype, a pilot solution, test findings, key insights, and opportunities for improvement.
05. Co-Creation
Transforming Insights into Solutions
What happens: This is where the four dimensions converge. Storytelling, inquiry, relationships, and experimentation come together to create something new, meaningful, and grounded in the experience.
Approaches: Scenario exploration workshops, synthesis of findings, pedagogical documentation, prototype presentations, participatory evaluation, and exchanges between territories.
Outcomes: A co-created solution, new knowledge, a documented learning journey, new questions, and the potential to adapt and apply the experience in other territories.
Transformative Connections
Innovation Happens Through Connection.
Our Living Lab connects children, educators, researchers, universities, governments, and international partners in an open network that brings diverse ways of knowing together and co-creates solutions to challenges—both local and global.