About Zingarelho

From Messejana
Connected to
the world

Participants in a robotics activity, Buinho archive

Ideas
People
Tools
Community

Learn
Make
Share
Grow ↘

A learning
lab

Founded in 2020 in Messejana, Zingarelho works in STEAM education, digital skills, inclusive technology and teacher training. Experimentation is the starting point for connecting knowledge, autonomy and participation.

Zingarelho grew out of Buinho, the creative hub and FabLab that has been taking digital fabrication and maker culture into Alentejo schools for years. Buinho Educativo was born at Buinho, but it does not end there: it is shared with Zingarelho, which acts as its forward edge. This is where new formats are tried first — inclusive technology, citizen sensing at school, structured courses for teachers from across Europe — sharing team, FabLab and territory with Buinho.

Zingarelho Lda and Buinho Associação are separate organisations: they collaborate, each with its own role in every project. This closeness lets us combine tools and contexts while keeping each organisation’s contribution clear.

What guides us

Innovation
that includes

Territory

Nine municipalities of Baixo Alentejo, from small parish schools to municipal maker spaces. Regular work close to the schools, so that distance does not mean fewer opportunities.

Inclusion

Technology as a way to include: tactile models, sensory maps, adapted materials and spaces designed together with the students who use them.

Innovation

New formats are piloted in real classrooms first — citizen sensing applied to sensory inclusion, biofabrication with schools, toy hacking for early childhood — and then documented so that others can use them.

Europe

Structured Erasmus+ courses for teachers from across Europe, and cooperation with schools and organisations in Germany, Slovenia, Serbia, Spain, Finland and Greece.

Residencies

Creative economy, rural inclusion

In Messejana we also host artists, designers and researchers in residence. Each residency brings new skills and international networks into a rural territory and opens them to local schools and the community — a small, steady way of putting the creative economy at the service of social inclusion.