Our second extracurricular session went very smoothly as planned. It was about creating everyone’s own country. Students draw the maps of their countries and name them. Each one draws their chits from a random box and marks their countries with the according climate zones onto their maps - forests, lakes, rivers, deserts, etc. It was surprising to see their creativity in this process. 

Then, we guide them to more complex concepts about what constitutes a country and what makes people identify with their own countries. We discussed things like languages, histories, and ideas with case studies of specific countries. At last, we all saw how these stories and ideas were transformed into unique flags for these countries. We were also glad to see that the students were very active in learning the meanings behind different flags and engaged in guessing the flags for different countries. 

The time for this session was a bit tight, so we decided to leave the activities of creating stories and flags for their own countries for the next session. 

For research, we focused mostly on creating our database. Throughout this process, we encountered many challenges. We realized that there wasn’t much information and data about extracurriculars created solely to solve SDGs. Therefore, after discussion, we shifted our focus to a broader topic — researching the presence and implementation of extracurriculars on the local, national, and global scale. 

When collecting information, I also noticed an interesting phenomenon that a lot of extracurriculars opened at Oxfordshire have a primary goal not to broaden students’ interest or improve their understanding of the world, but they were to keep the students in a safe place after school until their parents get off work and pick them up. The activities are just a supplement for these extracurricular sessions. So, we added a column on the aim of different extracurriculars to our database. 

We also proceeded to work on interviews to collect primary information. We are currently designing interview questions and sending interview invitations to our list of stakeholders. We hope that this interview can achieve two goals: firstly, to provide some information for the database that is not available online, such as the number of students attending the extracurriculars and the number of teachers, as well as if the school has partnerships with other organizations in the extracurriculars. Secondly, we also want to ask for more qualitative information about the success and challenges of the extracurriculars. We are curious to know if the schools or organizations think there needs to be additional help or support for their programs.