At the end of April, 15 Abingdon students joined over 100 students from partner schools for a morning of collaborative and challenging tasks with local education company House of Fun. The ChallengED event was hosted by Larkmead School as part of the OX14 Learning Partnership core event programme. The morning was made up of two IBrick challenges which involved designing and testing two challenging brick builds with a focus on teamwork and engineering. Mixed school groups encouraged students to meet new people and take on different roles within their teams. Students enjoyed making new friends and spending time working on the tasks as well as modifying their designs and learning from others.
Students said:
‘I think that it was a really great time well spent and it was even better that we got to meet people from other schools that we usually wouldn’t see.’
‘I liked how you could edit and modify what they told you to build and that allowed us to be more creative. It was also nice to socialise with people from my previous school.’
New for 2023/24 the partnership has planned three core events based on the aims. InspirED took place in November and was a morning of inspiring guest speakers and student stories for students in Year 10. ChallengED is the second in the programme and will be followed by SupportED, with a wellbeing focus, in June.