The U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) announced Wednesday that it will open two new University Transportation Centers (UTCs), one at the University of South Florida (USF) and one at Washington State University (WSU). Each UTC will receive $7.5 million in grant funding for transportation research and education. — Smart Cities Dive

With design, no solution is 100-percent right or wrong. It’s not like solving a mathematical problem. In sport, you can teach team spirit, but at the end of the day, it’s a competition and it boils down to winning and losing. But in design, there is no absolute answer, and it’s very much like in real life. — CityLab

For architects, the challenge is balancing the need for additional security with design principles that foster a more nurturing educational environment for students. As architect Jim French explained, designers could apply the design methods used to keep prisons secure to schools, but that would hamper the experience for children. — MarketWatch

WeWork has plans to launch a private elementary school for “conscious entrepreneurship” called WeGrow in a New York City location next year. The company has even tapped Danish architect du jour Bjarke Ingels to design the first school, dubbed “WeGrow," which will likely be within their new Fifth Avenue headquarters. “In my book, there’s no reason why children in elementary schools can’t be launching their own businesses,” said co-founder Rebekah Neumann. — 6sqft

School buildings in the UK are of such poor quality that children are underperforming and teachers are quitting the classroom, experts have warned.

A new study by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) found that one in five teachers have considered leaving their school as a result of stressful, overcrowded working environments caused by the poorly designed buildings they have to teach in. — independent.co.uk

'None of the buildings seemed built to impose and in all of them one had the sense that what mattered about a room was the spirit and determination with which it was filled, and the uses to which ingenuity could put it. When I want to remember what a first-class education felt like, that is the architecture I remember, and it mattered solely because of what people did with it.' — The Guardian

"The design of a school itself might matter as much as something like a gym class. 'The environments in which we live affect not just our behaviors, but our lifelong attitudes about things like healthy eating and active lifestyles...It's also clear that it's so much better to help prevent children from becoming obese than to try to help adults lose weight.' — Fast Company

... how does using a different physical space have an impact on learning? Bosch argued that changing the environment helps teachers and students to break free from old habits: "One of the things you can do is create an environment where you cannot function the same way as you used to. What happens when you go out of the school into a theatre, you have to improvise. When you improvise, you start learning and developing." — guardian.co.uk

Mark Simon, a founding partner of Centerbrook Architects and Planners, agrees. “I think [bars and other fortifying techniques] send the wrong message to both kids and teachers,” he says. Based in Centerbrook, Connecticut, Simon has designed 20 school buildings, including five public elementary schools, though none in Newtown. “Buildings tell stories, and when a building is designed that way, it tells you that it doesn’t trust you. And kids intuit that they’re not trusted,” he says. — archrecord.construction.com

After seeing “Best School in the World,” a Center for Architecture exhibition on the progressive learning environments where Finnish students to the top of world rankings, New York’s Justin Davidson aligned the layout of these schools more with tech company offices. We’ve rounded up a few of the design perks that your middle-school self never dreamed of. — blogs.artinfo.com

To do things differently, it helps to connect with new people and contexts. Universities and design schools seldom make that easy... This handout contains the most interesting ones we’ve found so far. It includes [with their permission] the findings of a scoping study for Schumacher College in England. No quality judgment is implied by inclusion in (or omission from) this list. — doorsofperception.com