Figma’s design tools are now free for all US school students

Figma is expanding its partnership with Google for Education to bring more students to its product design and collaboration platforms. Announced during the Config event on Wednesday, June 21, all K-12 students in the US will now have free access to Figma on Chromebooks for education. Figma is also expanding its educational partnership with Chromebooks outside the US, starting with Google schools in Japan.

Today’s announcement essentially opens up the beta program that Figma released last year, which was initially limited to select US high schools. As with the beta, students have access to both Figma (the company’s flagship product design tool) and FigJam, Figma’s collaborative whiteboard app. Figma’s Google program is only available on Chromebooks, though the company said schools using non-Google systems can request access for individual classes.

While Figma already offers free account tiers, these restrict users to a limited number of files and features. This offering for educational markets gives students and educators access to the company’s Enterprise tier — which typically starts at $75 per month per editor — without paying a dime. The Enterprise tier for Figma and FigJam is the company’s most powerful offering, enabling large groups of students to collaborate at scale. It also gives teachers full control over their Figma environments to ensure student safety and support classroom management.

Thanks to the Chromebook-specific benefits of this partnership, school administrators using Google Workspace for Education can deploy and manage Figma across numerous Chromebooks in just a few clicks, right in the Google Admin console. And given the popularity of Chromebooks in education (largely because they’re cheap, cloud-based, and easy to use), it’s not unreasonable to expect schools to have a few lying around.

To explain Why Figma and Google introducing kids to the same product design tools used by industry professionals is another matter. Since kids show a remarkable aptitude for adapting to new technologies (watching how quickly they can navigate a new gadget can be a humbling experience), Figma believes introducing them to the platform at a young age can help them develop early tech skills. development that they can use in the future. But both applications can also be used in a variety of other ways in classrooms, such as rewrite bookslearning new vocabulary termsAnd schedule class debates.

“We knew that by giving students access to industry-standard design software, they would be developing foundational skills for the future — learning how to solve problems, think iteratively, collaborate with others, and build empathy,” the company said in a blog post describing it. the expansion is announced . “Bringing Figma’s infinite canvas and design tools to Chromebooks allowed students to engage more deeply with their work and more effectively visually demonstrate what they know.”

This is also a nice balance between online and classroom learning. This hybrid approach can benefit children who have struggled with changes in their learning environment during the covid pandemic by encouraging them to collaborate and communicate with their peers on projects whether they are sitting next to them or at home. Some educators agree, at least according to Figma — the company said educators have praised the platform for helping students who are “hungry for connection after years of remote learning.”