Studio Liverpool received a grant of £99,750 in the 2016/17 Edge Grant Fund to support development of Studio DEN – a Digital Entrepreneurship Network.
Projects inspire going places, meeting people and doing/making things
Newcastle University received a grant of £77,532 in the 2018/19 Edge Grant Fund for their Problem Based Learning (PBL) Goes to University project.
Throughout this project a team from the Centre for Learning and Teaching, Newcastle University has worked with secondary schools, employers, university academics and outreach teams to develop sustainable, mainstream curriculum projects that incorporate subject content knowledge and the key principle of ‘going places, meeting people and doing/making things’. PBL goes to University delivers not only a suite of tried and tested PBL projects but also CPD for teachers and an introduction to PBL for PCGE trainee teachers. All of the projects have been developed with the involvement of employers ranging in size and scope from Northumbria Police, Rolls Royce and Jamie’s Ministry of Food, to small local businesses.
Around 30 PBL projects have been designed and tested to date, with more in the pipeline
These cover Years 7 to 13 and are a mixture of subject specific and cross curricular approaches. Examples include The Civil War project for Year 8 students which maps to the history, drama, English and science curriculum; Linguacuisine - a digital kitchen project for Years 7 and 8 mapped to the modern foreign languages curriculum and a Careers project for Year 12 looking at the 4 key employment sectors in the North East. The involvement of employers in the development of the projects also provides clear career signposting for the school communities.
A series of events have been held to encourage involvement
A series of dissemination events both virtual and physical have been held to encourage education professionals and those organisations who work with schools (museums, universities, employers etc) to get involved with project based learning.
Newcastle University is producing a planning guide to project based learning for teachers and Higher Education Institutions which will be available to download from their website.
Resources
Read the PBL Guide here.
Find out more
To find out more about this project contact Ulrike Thomas or visit PBL Goes to University.