Centennial Elementary School

There’s so much exploration and discovery that can take place right inside the learning environment, especially when your school includes a simulated space station, Jurassic expedition, and a campground nestled deep in the woods. The design team for Humble, TX ISD’s Centennial Elementary School wanted to create multiple pods for immersive experiences that boost student engagement and support social-emotional learning. Combining Tarkett’s Powerbond^® hybrid resilient flooring with the Imaginations^® custom-cutting program allowed the floor to support the entire experience.

“The carpet absolutely adds to the aesthetic and overall feeling of the pod and to the immersive experience. If you walked into the pods at any time, you could see a whole group engaged in some way, you could see a student just learning independently and being relaxed in that environment, or you could see a small group of students collaborating." 

– Alison Pierce, Principal

Imagined by you. Created by Tarkett.

To support engaged learning and social development among the K-5 student body, the team created several shared learning pods that are accessible to all students and educators. Each pod creates a completely unique, immersive experience that can support a specific lesson or serve as a simple change of scenery to break up the day. For example, “we’ll take a virtual field trip to France and go through the airport pod. Or I’ve seen the flooring used to support geometry units. As students are finding different perpendicular and parallel lines or different shapes, then can use the carpet to do that,” said Alison Pierce, Principal.

Even though the aesthetic is completely different in each pod, Powerbond RS was used throughout, giving students a soft, comfortable place to learn. “The number one piece is sound reduction. Being able to have various learning environments happening at the same time, carpet allows that because the sound isn’t bouncing off everything. We opened in August 2020, and it looks just as good today as it did the first day it was laid.”

Pierce has seen a difference in the student body’s social-emotional learning as well, noting that there hasn’t been a single disciplinary issue in the pod areas since they were completed. “In our district, we’ve developed the Humble ISD Portrait of a Graduate Competencies, and these are soft skills that we want every student to have when they graduate. Some of those are collaboration, problem-solving, being a leader, being creative, personal accountability. All of those pieces, you have to practice doing them, and this space allows students to practice those skills.