The ubiquity of collaborative knowledge building in all sectors of today’s technology-laden society, including industry, government, and cyber activities, opens new challenges about how to socialize children towards honing contemporary skills, roles and practices. This research addresses the challenge of designing classrooms that encourage students to go beyond acquiring knowledge, and learn to participate in and become members of a culture devoted to expanding the frontiers of knowledge. Advancing students' identities as knowledge builders supports the efforts to make scientific progress, to uphold democratic ideals, creatively innovate, and engage in concerted entrepreneurship. These are the types of citizens that are needed to ensure that the globalized world can address the multitude of challenges it is facing. There are two overall conclusions to this action. The first elucidated the way students' identities as knowledge builders develop and created a set of design principles that educational practitioners can use to best support these developments. The second conclusion was the establishment of a network of European researchers who advance scholarship in partnerships with schools around this topic, share findings, disseminate and best exploit results from ongoing research in this area.