Once a week, seventy preschool and primary school children at the Betània-Patmos school in Barcelona's Sarrià-Sant Gervasi district participate in a midday chess session. This activity has been offered as an extracurricular activity by the school to students from the fourth grade onward since 2011. "Parents really like it because it helps clear their minds and concentrate. But the children are also drawn to it," says Uriel Jiménez, the school's extracurricular coordinator. He adds that this is because the instructors teach chess using a playful methodology. For this reason, he says, it's one of the extracurricular activities with a higher enrollment rate than dropout rate throughout the school year. The Betània-Patmos school is one of 150 educational centers in the metropolitan area where the Catalan Chess School (ECADE) teaches chess. In most schools, chess is offered as an extracurricular activity, although some centers also hold regular classes during school hours and others offer occasional workshops. ECADE was founded in 2022 through the merger of two existing chess schools: the Barcelona Chess School and the Miguel Illescas Chess School. It also functions as an academy, with around 80 children attending afternoon classes at its premises, and as a club, with 40 members. In addition, they organize chess, board game, and strategy camps during Christmas, Easter, and summer breaks. In total, they have 38 instructors on staff who teach chess to 4,000 students each year.

"Biel, who is ten years old, does extracurricular English classes three days a week; kung fu, two days; parkour, one day, and music, three days. As part of his music activities, he plays piano, trumpet, musical theory, and two combos," explains Anna Aparicio, his mother. Biel dedicates between 11 and 12 hours to extracurricular activities per week. He is one of the 83% of children in Catalonia between the ages of 6 and 15 who participate in them. the study The pros and cons of extracurricular participation, published in 2023 by Aliança Educació 360. On the contrary, only 17% of children do not participate in any activity, 140,000 children in Catalonia. "These activities outside of school improve self-esteem, children can discover things they are good at and that make them feel better, they improve their social skills and have a better self-image," says Sylvie Pérez, a professor in the psychology and educational sciences department at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).

If you walk into Alex's room today, you might find anything. Any day now, I'll find an Ondas Award under the bed. He's very messy. Plus, he has this strange ability to make you believe things are more or less in their place, but when you open the closet or drawers, you see everything is a mess. Gina's room is tidier, although I think she's slowly picking up some of her brother's bad habits.

At the Universitat Pompeu Fabra they are preparing what they consider to be an "educational revolution". In two years' time, students will have half or fewer lectures and more group sessions in which the teacher will be a coach or tutor, fewer multiple-choice exams and more reflection and participation in class. Inspired by the wave of educational transformation that for a decade has changed schools and institutes in the country and also by how the best universities in the world, such as MIT and Stanford, work, the UPF wants to move towards a university model which "faces the future".