Winner: Manchester Metropolitan University
Project: Oubliette
Oubliette was an interactive installation designed and developed by students to help people overcome their fear of maths.
Named after the French for dungeon, the maths-based escape room took participants through eight themed challenge rooms ranging from a 1970s disco to an alien planet, and challenged them to solve problems and puzzles along the way. The idea was to remove the negative associations involved in learning maths and encourage people to engage with mathematical thinking in a different way.
It was inspired by the popularity of escape rooms and television programme the Crystal Maze, as well as by research at the university – particularly a collaboration between Mark Peace, head of education at the university, and Ricardo Nemirovsky, who studies the way the environment affects development of cognitive processes and how this influences maths learning.
Professor Nemirovsky spoke to students about the theories involved in his work and shared with them some of the installations he uses for exhibitions and demonstrations. They were then asked to use this as inspiration for Oubliette.
“It wasn’t, ‘Here’s some research, now do something with it’. It was, ‘Here’s some research that makes you think about maths – be inspired by it,’” says Peace.
Students studying art, English, sociology, engineering, education, events management and marketing all took part in designing, planning and building the project, which took nine months to put together.
Teams of students negotiated and risk-assessed potential venues, organised fund raising and arranged client visits, as well as taking responsibility for £25,000 in donations.
The project helped students, particularly those from non-traditional backgrounds, develop confidence. It had a particularly noticeable effect on the number choosing to go into teaching; most of the final year students involved are now doing teacher training.
Around 1,500 children visited the installation over its six-week run, cementing relationships between the university and schools in the region. Oubliette then ran over the summer as a paid attraction. Elements of the installation will now be incorporated in other university projects.
Runner-up: University of the West of England
Project: Paramedic major incident day
In January 2019, a rave at the University of the West of England’s Glenside campus resulted in multiple stabbings. Far from being a tragedy for the university, however, this was a carefully planned learning opportunity – a major incident simulation staged for the benefit of students in nursing, radiography, physician associate studies, journalism and film.
The original idea was to create an annual experience as part of the core curriculum for student paramedics to test the knowledge and practical skills they had learned as part of their course. But the university soon realised the benefits of broadening it out to other disciplines, and included more than 150 learners in the event.
Two working ambulances were used to transport “casualties” from the rave, held in a garage at the back of the campus with a music system and disco lights donated by university staff, to a fully staffed emergency department. This included an imaging department, resuscitation bay and minor incident triage centre.
The technical services team provided bleeding manikins, sound effects of sirens and an overhead helicopter, while the deputy vice-chancellor portrayed a parent injured while trying to find her son. Other members of staff pretended to be dancers at the rave. Local fire and rescue officers took part in the day, giving paramedic students experience of working alongside fire crews, while the presence of journalism and film students meant that those treating patients also had to deal with the distraction of being filmed.
The simulation day has now become a biannual fixture at the university, and paramedic students have formed the UWE Pre-Hospital Simulation Society, offering smaller scale simulations outside the curriculum for students from different disciplines.
Healthcare programmes other than paramedic science are now planning to include the next simulation day in their curricula, while the first cohort of police degree students, which enters UWE this year, will be involved in future events.
NHS England and other higher education institutions have visited UWE to find out about how to stage similar events in their organisations.
Runner-up: Edge Hill University
Project: #TELMe
The Technology Enhanced Learning (#TELMe) project for student teachers was a response to the realisation that while students may know how to use a smartphone, their digital knowledge can be superficial.
Edge Hill University’s faculty of education decided to introduce an intensive programme to give student teachers confidence in using new technologies, including virtual and augmented realities, both to bring their teaching to life in the classroom and to become more efficient.
The project builds bespoke programmes around what individual students say their goals are and where they need more experience.
Instead of using traditional lectures and seminars, the programme sends students on digital quests across the campus or tells them to create TED-style talks to share with peers. They learn how to use digital visuals to explain key concepts and video to give guidance about assignments, as well as how to incorporate audio feedback in assessments and take part in collaborative sessions with peers across the world.
They also find out how to turn traditional lecture notes into more visually interesting digital sketchnotes, use green screening to create a scene from Hogwarts, and use virtual reality to allow pupils to explore the Great Barrier Reef or International Space Station.
The project has allowed students not only to create teaching resources but also to develop policies about how to use technology in educational settings. And they have learned about technologies to make administrative tasks easier, such as using Doodle polls or online diaries.
One benefit of the project has been to encourage university staff to admit where they lack knowledge about new technology, too. Students have carried out development and mentoring sessions for their teachers, and the programme is being expanded to include staff. Sarah Wright, a senior lecturer in primary education who runs the programme, says staff saw that students were being more experimental with their use of technology and wanted to be involved too. Now, she says: “We’re giving them permission to have some fun with technology.”
As #TELMe is an extracurricular programme it has helped build new social groups and interactions between staff and students. The project has engaged more than 240 students and 25 staff . It helped one student have a major impact on a global educational technology company when, inspired by what she had learned through #TELMe, she was able to make a suggestion that significantly changed its product.
