New forms of work have appeared, prompted by digital development that forces business and workers to be more open, more collaborative. Despite the ever growing need for STEM skills, fewer and fewer youngsters tend to go on with scientific or technical studies. This is a true challenge to fight unemployment in most countries of the European Union. Here, the Leze and the Catalunia territories, while being two distinct environments, both undergo a weaker and weaker economic and social situation combined with a lack of pupils' interest in scientific and technical subjects. Although youngsters are avid users of digital media, they often prove to lack genuine knowledge in the ability to use ICT. To improve this situation, the Lèze area as well as Catalunya have been involved for a few years in projects of creative and sustainable territories known as “ smart cities”. Today their ambition is to transfer this model to the school system, by inciting the whole educative community ( teachers, educative staff, pupils, parents, educators) to imagine a smart school for tomorrow The purpose is to experiment for a number of years a project which will create a serious game imagining a smart school. It will be carried out by and dedicated to youngsters, so as to experiment in local middle schools how to create and achieve digital projects able to answer the users' needs while requiring STEM skills and appealing to everyone's creativity. It is all about putting the pupil's inventiveness and imagination at the heart of the teaching process by turning middle schools into spaces of innovation and of production of think tanks. This project is called “Collaborative Design for Smart Pupils”. Six partners are involved, three in France and three in Spain: they are the community of “communes” of the Lèze valley; André Saint Paul middle school; the centre of scientific and technical culture of the Midi- Pyrénées region, Science Animation; the generalitat de Catalunya with its department of innovation and research, the Virolai middle school; the Everis foundation, which is specialised in the evaluation of public policies. This project will be carried on for 25 months, from September 2015 to September 2017. First it will consist in the conception, plannification and implementation of a study showing how the activities involved in the projects could influence the pupils' ambitions and self confidence as well as their taste for scientific and technical subjects. Then, teachers will be given special training to enable them to get used to the tools of digital creation. These training sessions will also offer them the opportunity to confirm the collaborative teaching strategies involved in the project and to plan the first innovation and digital creation workshops. The purpose of these workshops, which will be follow an iterative and incremental approach, is to lead the pupils to consider their school in a different way, by acknowledging all the various stakeholders and good practices at work there. While acquiring the necessary skills and abilities, the pupils will contribute to the creation of innovative projects adapted to their environment. During two creative school trips, the pupils will be dispatched into actual living labs dealing with their own projects. The whole experiment will be documented on a hosting collaborative platform ( wiki), which will act as a tool kit with datas, reports, videos, tips and assets during the production phase of the Serious Game. The main topic of this Serious Game will be the Smart School. In order to comply with the philosophy of the whole project, the pupils will be managed as if they were real professionals of the video game industry. They will have to specialize in some fields and to work in collaboration with each other to gather a broader spectrum of skills. Doing so, they will experiment the actual processes of the creation of a video game with the added benefit of an educative purpose. Ultimately, the project will result new ways of teaching STEM, based on digital tools and creativity. This multidisciplinary and trans national approach will reduce inequity in the access to knowledge and contribute to a better learning of the cognitive skills necessary to thrive in the complex conceptual universe of the digital world. The results will be published during two events dedicated to collaborative teaching practices “ IT World Edu” in Barcelona, and the Summer Lab in Lézat- sur- Lèze.