From January 18 to 20, the final of the 2020 Global Competition on Design for Future Education was held. The gist of the competition is “See the future through pandemic. View the world through students. Observe education through design”. Hosted by Beijing Normal University, it is organized collectively Office of International Exchange & Cooperation of BNU, Students' Association of BNU, and the Smart Learning Institute of BNU etc., sponsored by the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education and the Organizing Committee Office of Beijing Design Week, and especially cooperated by Beijing Design Society. The competition aims to raise awareness of inclusive education, promote the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and prepare rich and effective solutions for uncertain future education based on the perspective of university students globally.

The chairman of the organizing committee is Zhou Zuoyu, vice president of BNU, and vice chairman, Huang Ronghuai, co-dean of the Smart Learning Institute of BNU. The team of 18 mentors consists of experts from China, Italy, Tunisia, Iran, Palestine, the Philippines, Japan, Germany and other countries, giving instructions in fields including education, design and computer science.

The Global Competition on Design for Future Education has been successfully held twice from 2018 to 2019. Due to the pandemic, the competition this year was held both online and offline. The competition adopted the Internet platform in global recruitment participation and coverage far exceeded the previous two sessions. Since its launch on September 1, 2020 , the competition has attracted more than 500 students from 157 institutions in 13 countries. Through online collaboration, students at home and abroad teamed up, participated and worked hard in the competition. Their multi-dimensional communications have broken the limits of the locations, time zones, majors and language barriers, showcasing the multiple possibilities to solve diverse problems in the future. The competition is oriented to the future and inclusive education. Many teams focused on poverty alleviation, left-behind children, autism and other special groups of people, and tailor-made systemic solutions, which reflected a high degree of social responsibility of contemporary college students.

In this year's 48-hour final, 22 teams from 36 institutions around the world began intense design under the real-time online guidance of 18 mentors online. Focusing on education in crisis, personalized education, special education, and rural education, the teams proposed creative solutions to explore the future path of education. During the three reports and one roadshow,  each team in turn stated the design concept and displayed results. In the meantime, the mentors online were always ready to give guidance as well as supervision in accordance to their respective conditions.

Finally five teams won the awards. The GOGO team composed of students from Northwest Normal University, Xinjiang Normal University, Central China Normal University and Diablo Valley College in the US, as well as ALL See Love team composed of students from BNU shared the first place. Six other teams received mentor nominations and nine received honorable mentions.