What if design could make science irresistible to kids?
Scintillab is turning Italian primary school classrooms into laboratories of discovery. Co-designed by Fondazione OpenDot, the kit lets children learn STEM by touching, testing and getting things wrong. We spoke with President Laura Dellamotta about the design behind it.
Inside a growing number of Italian primary school classrooms, science is something children build, shake and observe with their own hands. This is Scintillab, an educational kit promoted by Fondazione Agnelli together with Ferrari, developed with the scientific contribution of CNR – Public Relations and Integrated Communication Unit and co-designed by Fondazione OpenDot, bringing STEM disciplines into the classroom through direct experimentation. Cylinders to guess by sound, shadow theatres, ramps for rolling objects: each tool turns an abstract concept into something children can touch and get wrong on their way to understanding it.
Since launching in 2025/2026, the project has already reached almost five thousand students across six Italian provinces. We spoke with Laura Dellamotta, president of Fondazione OpenDot, about co-design, inquiry-based learning, and putting the body back at the centre of how children learn.
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Scintillab:
To begin with, could you tell us what Scintillab is and how the project came about?
Laura Dellamotta:
Scintillab is an innovative educational kit co-designed by OpenDot in collaboration with CNR, created to bring STEM disciplines into primary school classrooms through hands-on experimentation, inviting students and teachers alike to look at the world with curiosity and scientific rigor. It’s an initiative promoted by Fondazione Agnelli together with Ferrari, with the scientific contribution of CNR’s Public Relations and Integrated Communication Unit, and it’s offered to schools completely free of charge.
The project was initiated by Fondazione Agnelli, long active in STEM education through initiatives like Matabì and HOP, which brought in CNR for the scientific design of the kit’s content, with Ferrari stepping in as funder. OpenDot was then selected to co-design and develop the kit itself, both conceptually and physically. The choice made sense given our background: we started as a fab lab and grew into an innovation hub centered on research applied also to education, giving us both the experience and the concrete capability to design and produce, from early prototypes through to finished objects ready for classrooms.
At the heart of the initiative is an educational kit designed for primary schools. What does the box contain, and how is it used by teachers and students?
Laura Dellamotta:
Scintillab is what we like to call a “box full of science”, designed for classes from third grade up, meant to turn the classroom into a laboratory of discovery. Inside are simple, open, versatile tools organized around different areas: cylinders you shake to guess what’s inside from the sound; a light-and-shadow area where children build a kind of theatre and observe how shadows change; a gravity-and-movement area with ramps and objects to roll down them; a math-and-probability area with coins and dice; and a balance area for building improvised scales.
Activity sheets guide the whole experimental journey. It follows Inquiry-Based Learning, so experience always comes before theory. Teachers act as guides rather than dispensers of answers and go through a free training day, accredited on the SOFIA platform, before using the kit. Students work in small groups, encouraged to experiment and get things wrong, since here a mistake isn’t a failure but a step toward discovery. The project was designed with particular care for schools with fewer resources, to show that doing science doesn’t require complex technology, just attentive eyes and curious minds.
Co-design is a key element of OpenDot’s approach. How did this methodology shape the development of Scintillab?
Laura Dellamotta:
Scintillab is the product of a complementary network including Ferrari, Fondazione Agnelli, CNR and ourselves, where collaboration between very different skill sets generates real value. OpenDot acted as a kind of third space, connecting the scientific rigor of CNR with the educational needs of the school and the culture of making typical of design. Co-design is what transformed Scintillab from a simple supply of materials into a genuine educational method, one that doesn’t teach content so much as build the capacity to ask questions about the world.
One of our core principles in education is putting the body back at the center of learning, and co-design let us translate abstract concepts like probability or gravity into gestures, physical exploration and concrete prototypes, embracing error as part of the experience throughout.
Scintillab is based on inquiry-based learning. How does it work, and what are its main benefits?
Laura Dellamotta:
Inquiry-Based Learning turns the classroom into a laboratory of discovery, moving away from lecture-based teaching. The teacher stops being a dispenser of answers and becomes a guide, there to spark curiosity rather than give immediate solutions. Activities are built to raise questions – where does my shadow go when I turn off the light, why do things always fall down – that naturally lead to further investigation. Children work in small groups, observing and testing their own ideas, and mistakes are treated as a normal, necessary part of the process.
The benefits are wide-ranging: curiosity paired with scientific rigor, the ability to reach a goal through different routes, abstract concepts made physical and tactile, and collaboration built through group work. And because it relies on simple materials rather than expensive technology, it works just as well in schools with very limited resources, showing that scientific discovery is accessible to everyone.
Where has Scintillab been implemented so far, and how many schools have been involved?
Laura Dellamotta:
In its first school year, 2025/2026, Scintillab has already reached 59 school institutes, 238 teachers and 4,700 students across the provinces of Cuneo, Savona, Modena, Parma, Ancona and Matera. Over the next two years, the goal is to consolidate and extend the initiative nationally, reaching 800 teachers and 15,000 students, expanding into Brindisi, Salerno and Catania.
Feedback has been very encouraging: among 125 teachers who responded to a follow-up survey, 81% had already used the box in class, and all 15 activities had been tested in at least one classroom. Teachers reported greater student participation, stronger observation skills and increased interest in science, with particular engagement from students usually less active during lessons. Overall, 88% described their experience as “very positive,” with the remaining 12% “fairly positive”.
Why is it important to introduce children to STEM subjects from an early age? And what role can design play in this process?
Laura Dellamotta:
Primary school is when children build their basic sensibilities, languages, and cognitive and relational skills, so introducing STEM early means working on prevention rather than emergency. When mediated by the body and direct experience, this counters a kind of poverty of experience – without physical exploration, children risk losing the ability to grasp nuance – and keeps learning whole, so intelligence never gets separated from perception and movement.
Design plays a key role as the discipline that builds relationships between spaces, people, tools and bodies, translating abstract concepts into physical experiences and tangible prototypes children can touch and manipulate. It creates spaces of possibility that allow freedom and student protagonism rather than imposing one right way of doing things, treating technology as an extension of the body rather than an end in itself. In the end, design applied to STEM education shifts the focus from teaching passive content to enabling active learning, where science becomes an adventure to explore with the whole body.
