Case Study - Outdoor lessons for teachers, already written

Overview

There is a teacher who knows their class would be calmer, more awake, and more themselves after half an hour outside, and who never quite gets there, because planning it is one more thing on a list that is already too long. Nature Class is built for that teacher.

Each week there is one ready lesson. It carries every word to say aloud, a note beside each line for the adult, the kit to bring, and a sheet to print for the children. The teacher opens it on a tablet, walks outside, and reads. Nothing to prepare, and no nature knowledge required.

The lesson is chosen for the school, not for a generic classroom. Nature Class reads where the school is, the season, and the morning's weather, and picks the session that fits, with a wet-weather version ready when it rains. A one-minute narrated preview lets the teacher hear how the lesson runs before break is over.

It is free for teachers and open source. There are no child accounts or profiles, and location is used for weather, season, and what lives nearby, and for nothing else. Nature Class grew out of Rewyld for Schools, a pilot with London primary schools, and was built out in the Assembly Code cohort in 2026.

How we solved it

Zero prep is a real constraint, not a slogan. If a teacher has to choose the week or set anything up, we have already lost them. So the product decides for them, from the date, the place, and the weather, which meant designing a curriculum that stays coherent whether a class starts in September or joins halfway through the year.

Everything is data. A curriculum pack is one file holding sessions, phases, and typed blocks, and the engine simply renders whichever block comes next. That is what lets one lesson exist as a teleprompter, a printed A4 page, and a narrated preview without three separate builds, and what lets an ability variant or a wet-weather alternative live in the pack instead of in code.

Honesty about the outdoors is the other constraint. The live conditions come from Pointmoon, our own place-truth service, and when it cannot know, the lesson says so and falls back to authored text rather than inventing a fact. The spoken lines are written in the register of meeting and noticing, never testing, so a teacher can say them as written, outdoors, to a class of six-year-olds.

What we built