As we are now fast approaching the end of our 6 week research project, I must admit that work is speeding up. We have had a lot of unexpected obstacles come up and had to think on our feet a lot.

Week 3 began with planning the second session with the children, now also considering the feedback we had received from them previously. The older kids wanted to play some Geography trivia quizzes. so we thought that could be a nice activity to end the sessions with. However amidst all this planning, we were informed that a slight mess up had occurred. Due to miscommunication with the schools, we now had to go to both the schools on the same day! In a group size of 4, this meant that only two of us could go to one school and conduct a session. Based on this new situation, we modified our sessions accordingly. So this time I went to the school with the younger kids. This was a different experience from the previous week as 8 year old's have a much lower attention span and it's more difficult to keep them focused. At the same time, they are much more interactive and willing to engage with the material.  Hence, this was a nice learning experience for me. 

On the research front, we now had a clear insight of the steps we had to take. In Week 3, I had the role of creating the database of extracurricular activities for underprivileged children around the world. Within a week, we were able to find loads of them and realised that we would have to shortlist these based on some criteria like accessibility. This was an eye opening experience for me because I realised that there were more such programmes than I was expecting to find, especially in the UK. Finally, Week 4 entailed drafting an invitation to interview and then sending that out to people at all the shortlisted programmes. 

Overall, the programme is going quite well as we are now slowly understanding how social science research is done. The last two weeks will entail wrapping up the final sessions with the children, conducting the interviews and writing the final research paper with our findings. I am looking forward to seeing what to find from the interviews!