The story behind Class2Class

Intercultural exchange

I have always loved travelling and meeting other cultures. It makes you reflect on how people in other countries live, and it makes you reflect on your own life at home.

I believe every person should have the opportunity to learn about other cultures. Especially now, there is a strong need for more global understanding. We need to be able to communicate and collaborate across borders to solve problems that are global by nature.

Bolivia

Many years ago I spent a year and a half in Bolivia, training health-care workers. It was the most exciting and transformational experience I have had.

It also let me see how children in rural schools were struggling: too few good teachers, poor facilities, a lack of school materials. Somehow it left me with the feeling that one day I would do something in education, and pay back a little of what that time gave me.

UNICEF and the refugee camps

Later I founded Saxo, which became the largest online bookstore in Denmark. That work led to a collaboration with UNICEF Denmark. Together we created a project called Buy a Book, Give a Book, which over time raised around one million US dollars in donations.

It also meant that UNICEF invited me to visit refugee camps in Jordan. That was another eye-opening experience. I saw children living their entire lives inside the camps, with a very low probability of higher education or a job. It made me think about how those children could connect with children outside the camps, and how they might get an education that made a job, or their own business, more likely.

The SDGs and children’s rights

Working with UNICEF also made me aware of the Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Both turned out to be excellent frameworks for talking about local problems in a global context.

Children building solutions

At Saxo we hosted Coding Pirates in our offices: volunteers teaching programming to children aged 9 to 12 after school.

One day a company working with design thinking, a methodology developed at Stanford University, came to visit. We ran a test project in which the children invented and built solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems. I was blown away by their engagement and creativity, and so were their parents.

Three ideas, one starting point

Intercultural exchange. The Sustainable Development Goals. Children building solutions through design thinking. Those three components became the starting point for Class2Class.

Today teachers and students can create projects and collaborate on them with other school classes around the world.

Changemakers

But it does not stop there. We want students to take part in a series of projects on cultural exchange, the Sustainable Development Goals, children’s rights and sustainability, and over time grow into changemakers. Their teachers grow alongside them, gradually acquiring the skills to guide that transformation.

Students start in Class Mode, where the teacher coordinates the class experience. As they are invited onto the platform, they move into Student Mode, with more agency and direct dialogue with students elsewhere.

The ultimate goal is students who are fully equipped with 21st-century skills and empowered to build solutions together, with the kind of entrepreneurial mindset that wants to build things for the future.

Just as I have had the privilege of turning my own experiences into a mission and a solution in the shape of Class2Class, we want students to formulate their own missions, based on their own interests, and build their own solutions.