Remember being a kid and daydreaming about what it would be like if school wasn’t just rows of desks and boring classes? What if you could go to a school where, instead of memorizing facts you may never reference again, you learned how to garden, make art, build things (based on math equations!), and work on projects of your choice?

This daydream has come true just around the corner from Stamen at Brightworks, an exploratory school whose method is rooted in project-based learning. Right now the kids’ curriculum is focusing on maps, wrapping up a month-long study covering wayfinding, ecosystem maps, map projections, topology, and more. Stamen was invited to Brightworks for an afternoon visit, where we got to have a show-and-tell about the kinds of maps we make.

In our presentation, we covered a range of works, starting with maps and moving into data visualizations, answering questions from the (well-behaved, sweet and attentive) kids throughout the talk.