How pupils can design a new school website during a project day

For pupils, the school website is often practically invisible. They do not use it and usually never visit it at all. Try asking: ‘Who has visited our school website this year?’ If anyone raises a hand, follow up with: ‘How many times?’ or ‘Why did you go there?’ You can ask colleagues in the staffroom or parents at parent–teacher meetings similar questions. The answers are often much the same. That is a good reason to look at the school website through pupils’ eyes and try to do something about it.

Ask pupils to look at your website from the perspective of a new classmate, a parent, a prospective pupil or a former pupil. This simple brief can grow into a lively project day. Pupils investigate real user needs, organise information, design clearer content and finally present their own prototype, which, with a little willingness, could become a new website or part of one.

Why a school website makes a good project topic

Every pupil has at least some familiarity with the school website, but rarely considers whom it serves or why some information is easy to find while other details take several minutes. The topic therefore needs little introduction. Simply open the current website and ask: Could someone who knows nothing about our school find their way around it?

Several areas naturally come together at this point. Pupils work with text and language, ask questions and discuss ideas, decide which information matters, consider the school’s image, design a visual hierarchy and learn to justify their decisions to others. Older pupils can add basic user research, simple prototyping or accessibility work. They do not need programming skills. The aim is not to build a finished website, but to understand a problem and propose a convincing solution.

It also helps to explain from the outset what will happen to the results. If the headteacher, website administrator or student council will see the proposals, the work takes on greater significance. Pupils realise they are not just working for a grade. At the same time, it is only fair not to promise that the school will actually implement their design. A realistic outcome is a set of recommendations and a prototype from which the school can select useful ideas.

Let pupils and their findings set the direction

Most preparation is not about technology, but about defining a good brief. I recommend reviewing the current website beforehand and identifying areas worth exploring: the homepage, contacts, news, information for prospective pupils, the calendar or the canteen page. You do not need to point out mistakes to pupils immediately. Just know where to guide their research if they get stuck. A good project day, however, does not follow a route predetermined by the teacher. Pupils set its direction through what they discover on the website.

Does the website look dated? Pupils will probably focus on design, graphics and comparisons with the environments they know from mobile games, apps, social media or YouTube. Is the main problem a complicated, deeply nested menu? Then they will explore navigation and the logic of individual screens. A third common focus is content: missing, incomplete or hard-to-understand information. In that case, they can concentrate on what belongs on the website, whom it is for and how much detail visitors need.

Each of these topics can take the project day in a different direction. Different groups or classes can tackle different topics, too. This is a good opportunity to repeat the project, build on earlier work or exchange roles between classes so that it does not end as a single isolated day.

What to prepare before pupils arrive

Decide beforehand what kind of prototype is realistic for your group. For younger primary pupils, it might be a paper homepage design. For lower secondary pupils, a few screens made in presentation software work well, perhaps with prepared sets of icons, buttons, backgrounds and fonts. Upper secondary pupils can work in Figma, Canva or another familiar tool. Clickability is a bonus, not a requirement. What matters more is whether the design responds to what pupils discovered in their research.

If you want to involve AI, check tool availability, age requirements and school rules beforehand. With younger pupils, the simplest approach is teacher-mediated use: the group prepares a prompt, the teacher enters it and everyone evaluates the output together. Never enter pupils’ names, personal contact details, non-public school documents or photographs without clear permission into public AI tools.

The start of the day determines whether pupils solve a problem or simply draw attractive pages

Do not begin by showing finished designs or inspiring examples from other websites. Pupils can easily fixate on the most obvious differences and soon start discussing colours, logos and animations before they know whom the website should serve or why. Instead, give groups short scenarios: a parent looking for the date of a parent–teacher meeting; a prospective pupil finding out what makes the school interesting; a new pupil needing contacts and a map; a teacher from another school seeking information about a joint project; or a parent needing to cancel a school lunch.

Wording matters a great deal. ‘A parent needs to cancel a school lunch’ may lead to a different solution from ‘A parent is looking for the canteen’s phone number to cancel a lunch’. In the first case, pupils may realise that the parent need not phone at all: a single button or simple form could suffice. Whether the school can implement it immediately is not the point. What matters is letting pupils think, recording their ideas and discussing them.

Groups have a few minutes to find the requested information on the real website. They time themselves, record dead ends and note words a visitor might not understand. They assess navigation, design and clarity. The ensuing discussion is often surprisingly specific. Instead of general statements that the website is old or confusing, pupils begin saying: The school office contact is three levels down in the menu. The calendar does not show whom an event is for. A new pupil cannot tell where to go on the first day. They often ask why something is so complicated or why important information is missing altogether.

These observations form the basis of the brief. Depending on time and the number of pupils and teachers involved, each group can choose just one user and one situation to improve. This brings the project down to a manageable size. Designing an entire school website in one day usually produces superficial results. A carefully considered homepage or route to a few important pieces of information, by contrast, can be very convincing.

Do not try to investigate and redesign the entire website. Equally, there is little point in stopping at minor cosmetic changes that do not solve the problem. It is better to solve one specific problem from start to finish than identify and discuss twenty.

From impressions to small-scale user research

Pupils’ own experience matters, but it is not enough on its own. If school routines allow, let groups approach actual users: pupils from other year groups, teachers, school office staff or parents. The canteen and after-school club can also take part. Let pupils prepare a short interview guide and help them stay focused on questions that yield useful answers.

Interviews need not be long. It is enough to find out when the person last used the school website, what they were looking for, whether they found it, what frustrated them and what they feel is missing. Show pupils the difference between a question that confirms their opinion and one that uncovers something. ‘Do you also find our website confusing?’ will not reveal much. Better questions are: ‘What did you last look for on the website?’ or ‘Show us how you would find this information.’ The teacher can guide the research and ensure groups do not settle for the first opinion that suits them.

After the interviews, groups organise their findings. They can write users’ statements on paper and list possible needs alongside them: finding a date quickly, understanding what the school offers, knowing whom to contact or reading the website comfortably on a phone. Only then do they formulate the question their design will answer. For example: How can we show a prospective pupil, within one minute, what they can learn here and where to find more information?

Where AI can help — and where it should stay out

In this project, AI is most useful as a partner for exploring alternatives. It can suggest a page structure for a particular visitor, shorten a lengthy school text, offer different headlines or flag missing information. Encourage pupils to request several options and compare them rather than adopt the first answer. This project day can also work perfectly well without AI.

If you involve AI, you could try a prompt like this:

The last sentence matters. AI does not know precise facts about our school and must not fill in gaps by guessing. Another useful role is that of a critical reviewer. A group can describe its design and ask AI to look for ambiguities from the perspective of a parent, a pupil with limited Czech or someone using a phone. Even then, its input is not an authoritative assessment. Pupils must compare each suggestion with their research and decide whether it is relevant.

AI should not decide how the school presents itself or generate information that must be accurate. Contacts, dates, admissions rules and school documents must come from verified sources. Generated photographs require similar caution. If the prototype includes images, pupils can use neutral placeholders, their own approved photographs or clearly labelled illustrative images.

Prototyping does not have to be technically complicated

Once groups have identified their user, need and main content, they can begin putting a page together. I recommend spending a few minutes with pencil and paper first. Paper designs are easy to revise, and pupils worry less about perfection. Each group should be able to explain what visitors see first, what next step the design offers and why the sections appear in that order.

Only then should the design move into a digital format. Some classes benefit from assigning roles: one person keeps track of user needs, another prepares text, another assembles screens and another checks that the design remains coherent. Roles need not be rigid. They do, however, help prevent one technically confident pupil from taking over the computer while everyone else watches.

During this stage, teachers need not circulate asking whether groups have finished. More useful questions are: What is your decision based on? What will your user see first? Which information is factual, and where did you verify it? What would happen on a small screen? Questions like these shift attention from decoration back to the project’s purpose.

If you want pupils to experience the appeal of a clickable prototype, it can be made in PowerPoint, although this takes more work. If your pupils use Scratch, screens can be linked there too. AI tools can also help with prototyping. Using them can broaden the programme to include safe AI use, recognising generated content or copyright.

Testing is often the most valuable part of the day

Pupils often see the first completed version as the final result. In fact, it is only ready to be tested. Groups should therefore exchange prototypes or invite users they interviewed that morning. The tester receives a specific task, such as finding the enrolment date or whom to contact about visiting the school. During the test, the creators do not explain where to click. They simply observe where the person hesitates, what they do not understand and anything that does not work for them.

After each test, a group can record one thing that worked, one obstacle and one change it will actually make. This teaches pupils that feedback is not a vote on whether a design looks nice. It is information about whether the solution helps a particular person complete a particular task.

If time is short, there is no need to fix everything. Even a quick second version of one screen demonstrates an important principle: a good digital product is not born from a single idea, but from repeated testing and refinement.

What the day’s schedule might look like

Treat the timetable as support, not a minute-by-minute script. Younger classes will need more shared work and fewer tools. More experienced groups can spend longer on interviews and prototyping.

The first lesson can introduce the project, its goal and rules, followed by an initial exploration of the website. The break and second lesson can be used for interviews. Where possible, let pupils speak to other classes and teachers. You might also arrange for one or two parents to be available online or by phone to broaden the sample of respondents.

Pupils can spend the next lesson analysing their findings. With older pupils, you can include basic statistics, charts or a simple SWOT analysis. However, I recommend this mainly when several classes are involved, the work is divided up or the project runs over several days. Leave enough time for design, sketches, text work, any AI-generated alternatives and conversion into a prototype. Allow around two lessons for this stage.

If younger year groups prepare design elements, for example, these need to be passed on to the class developing the prototype. Use the final lesson for testing and creating a revised version. Give yourself and the pupils an opportunity to present the results to others, too.

What to assess and how

Do not focus primarily on the final appearance, amount of content or technical sophistication. It is more useful to consider whether the group identified a user, investigated their needs, based its design on findings, distinguished verified facts from ideas, involved everyone and made a real change after testing.

For the final presentation, groups can follow a simple outline: Whom did we want to help? What did we find out? What solution do we propose? What did not work during testing? What did we change? This tends to produce shorter, more focused presentations than showing every screen. It also allows school leadership or other guests to compare proposals using the same questions.

Assessment should also include reflection on AI use. Pupils can describe what they used it for, which suggestions they rejected or corrected and how they verified information. The aim is not to reward the group for using the most tools. What matters is whether they used them thoughtfully and took responsibility for the final design.

What the school can retain after the project day

The most valuable outcome need not be a single winning design. The school may gain a list of recurring problems, perspectives from different user groups, suggestions for clearer wording or several tested routes to important information. If an idea is later used, let pupils know. They will see that careful research and a well-explained proposal can influence their real school environment.

The project can extend across several subjects. Czech lessons can explore editing and writing for different audiences. Art can contribute visual hierarchy, design, logos, icons or infographics. Computing offers prototyping and accessibility. Citizenship can address an institution’s public image, copyright, GDPR basics and personal data protection. In mathematics, pupils can process research findings, basic statistics and charts. Advanced pupils and upper secondary classes can also explore SEO, marketing, digital communication and presentation. In this sense, the school website is a shared problem, not the preserve of a single subject.

If you want to think through the general approach first, see AI project day at school: from an idea to a safe prototype. For a broader cross-curricular perspective, see An AI school project: connecting learning, data and digital creation and Project-based learning with AI: cross-curricular examples for primary and secondary schools.