We want children and young people in rural areas to have the same opportunities to learn as those in big cities — and schools to be places where everyone belongs.
Digital skills are the starting point. Our purpose is broader: inclusion, relevant skills and innovative approaches for rural schools, with technology at the service of every student.
And learning does not stop at school: in the villages, we work with adults and seniors who rarely have anywhere to learn.
What we do
Rural schools — coding, robotics, digital fabrication, design and science, linked to the curriculum and to the territory.
Technology for inclusion — tactile materials, sensory environments and tools designed with teachers and families, for autistic children, blind and low-vision students and everyone who learns differently.
Non-formal education — new practices in makerspaces, holiday programmes and training for teachers and educators.
Adults and community — repair, sewing, digital literacy and making with seniors, women and migrant workers in the villages and towns of the region.
Maker education
Learning by doing: starting from a real problem, experimenting, failing and improving until there is an object, a prototype or a public presentation. It is our FabLab's method, brought into schools.
Around it has grown an educational ecosystem in Baixo Alentejo: several makerspaces in schools and municipalities across the region, connected to the Buinho FabLab in Messejana.
Adults and community
Since 2016 the FabLab has also been a place for adults who rarely have anywhere to learn — seniors in the villages, women, migrant workers. Small, regular groups: around 120 adults over the past year.
The Messejana sewing club, Repair Cafés with Resialentejo, support for the Misericórdia de Messejana care home and the region's senior universities — and four Erasmus+ adult education projects: FABLABs, WeRepair, RECA and RE-POWER.
Territory
We work at the scale of Baixo Alentejo, a low-density region where distance weighs more heavily on schools. The map shows the municipalities where we work or have worked.
Education is shared with Zingarelho, the learning lab we set up in Messejana in 2020: the same team and the same FabLab, where new formats and inclusive technology in schools are tested.
Buinho Academy
Online courses for teachers and educators, guides from our activities and the open tools we have built — the digital home of our education work.
Projects in international partnerships with schools, universities and organisations across Europe.
Partners and clients
