Eduframe

Eduframe - Experiential learning system is a psychomotor training system co-designed by OpenDot in partnership with Ruggero Poi, vice-president of Fondazione Montessori Italia and M<>A Montessori incontra Alzheimer (M<>A Montessori meets Alzheimer).

Eduframe combines two seemingly distant areas - Maria Montessori's educational method and the degenerative dementia described by Alois Alzheimer - to test new techniques for delaying the psychophysical degeneration of sufferers. The colourful and easy-to-operate panels are designed to catch the eye in passage places, such as corridors in schools, hospitals and hospices. Like the Montessori pedagogical method, Eduframe encourages fragile and special need users to develop or maintain independence. These experiential mechanisms can be combined and tailored where simple and repeated actions generate user reflection for the movement exercised, conveying the development of psychomotricity, coordination and sense.

They use analogue mechanisms that can be combined and customised, and are simple acts such as moving, touching, pressing, turning, etc., stimulating repeated actions that facilitate concentration, psychomotor exercise and coordination. These tools allow the patient to focus on a single aspect of the object (colour, sound, roughness, length), working on fine manual skills and sequences of gestures, encouraging the organisation of thoughts. Eduframe panels encourage focusing on skills that are still possessed and not on those lost. 

 The panels are the result of a co-design process that allowed educators and designers to experiment with new objects and tools that respond more accurately to personal needs at any age. 

Five facilities throughout Italy adopted Eduframe: the O.A.S.I nursing home in Biella, the Montessori Waiting Room in the Geriatrics Department of Biella Hospital, the residences for the elderly Villa Ranuzzi, Villa Serena in Bologna, and the Isola del Cantone Hospital in Liguria.

Eduframe was a finalist in the MAKEtoCARE contest promoted by Sanofi.