A school in the British city of Stoke-On-Trent is taking teaching to new heights. Sort of.
The city's school system has purchased a retired 36-seat commuter plane and is converting it into a working classroom for its elementary school students. Now officially part of the Kingsland Primary School, the plane will house 30 youngsters and is "the UK's first aircraft based classroom for primary school pupils."
The plane, which now sits on the school's playground, is a Short 360, a boxy, 30-seat commuter plane developed by a subsidiary of Bombardier.
The 16,600 pound Short, which entered service in 1981, is 70 feet long and 23 feet high with a wingspan of 74 feet. It has been used by a handful of commuter and freight airlines, and as of
2006, 85 of the planes were in service. The one picked up by Kingsland Primary for its classroom was last flown by UK carrier Emerald Air.
We thought the whole idea was a little goofy when we first heard about it, but
Kingsland's plan for its aero-classroom is actually quite cool. The space will be used to teach geography classes, with students pretending they've flown to the places they're studying. "We were trying to find ways we could make the school a more creative place for pupils to learn and teachers to teach," said Rachel Billington of Creative
Partnerships, an organization that helped acquire the plane.
While the school's administration would surely love to take credit for such a novel idea, it readily admits that it can't. 'We wanted an outside classroom and talked to the children about the kind of space they wanted and they came up with the idea of a plane themselves, said Kingsland Primary's headmaster David Lawrence. "So we thought we would see how we could go about buying one."
Before you start wondering where a school system gets off buying a plane in the midst of a global recession, consider this: the school picked it up for less than £20,000 ($30,000), about half of what it would cost to build a mobile classroom.
Moving day was a major event, with students and teachers alike watching as the Short was towed and then lifted to its final destination on the playground. But things didn't go all that well. In the course of the move the plane crushed flowerbeds, got stuck in the mud, knocked down a lamp post, and scraped a satellite dish off the side of a nearby house. "Fortunately my children weren't home - but my cat was and he was definitely startled by the whole thing," said Paula Brannigan of her dinged up digs. No comment from the cat.
Now that the plane is safely in place, it will be fixed up and equipped with desks, whiteboards, laptops, and all the other paraphernalia you'd expect to find in a modern classroom, along witha few extras. A widescreen TV will be installed to show videos shot from the air, an artist will work with the kids on airplane-themed decoration, and the grounds outside the plane will be landscaped to look like – you guessed – a runway.
The Daily Mail has a great series of photos that shows the plane being lifted to its new home.
Exterior photo: Flickr/Danny McL
Interior photo: Flickr/BARMCD
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