Proposal for an Ikea furniture-based curriculum for lower school students 2026-05-16 Skills addressed (in order by year): - Tool use, fasteners, spacial reasoning - Instruction following - Leadership & teamwork - Efficiency and optimization of tasks - Precise technical communication in speech - …in writing - Generalized team structures for collective intelligence and group intuition to adapt to new scenarios Year one: Students participate with an instructor in assembling Ikea furniture kits, interpreting instructions, using provided tools. Year two: Students form teams with instructor oversight to assemble furniture kits, negotiating leadership, differences between levels of understanding, giving and receiving accurate instructions. Year three: Student teams are given identical furniture kits with a week to practice and develop a cooperative strategy for the most efficient assembly of the kit. Then they compete to assemble the kit the fastest. Year four: Students are given a week to develop the most efficient cooperative strategy for assembling a furniture kit and write up a description of the strategy to go with the instructions. The kit and written strategy is given to another team with the same number of members who studies the strategy and must assemble the kit. Their assembly time is the score of the team who developed and wrote the strategy. Each team in the class develops a strategy, switches with another team, and competes. Year five: Student teams are tasked with developing generalizable team dynamics, patterns, and communication systems for efficient assembly of furniture kits. Each team is given a kit they have never seen before and its assembly is timed. Ikea could sponsor the curriculum, providing kits and using assembled furniture as floor models. Especially fast teams and students could be sponsored or hired for use in Ikea advertising.