Coming back after summer, I looked forward to meeting the other Laidlaw scholars again, and being able to begin on our research and extracurricular projects. 

In particular, our group designed a mystery-based extracurricular building soft skills including creative-writing, planning and presentation, alongside investigating UK’s extracurricular policy.

First, for the extracurricular, we ran through each other’s activities with all the Laidlaw members. Through enabling kids to design their own immersive and interactive mystery, we focus on building soft skills including creative-writing, planning, script-writing and presentation. In particular, practicing our activities with each other let us put ourselves in the shoes of the children rather literally,  giving each other personalized feedback and reflecting on our own activities.

Then, we brought it into the schools, where the kids were really nice and incredibly engaged, tackling each activity with lots of energy. We found it important to balance how quickly the kids picked up different concepts, while splitting them into groups ensured the chance for customized interaction. From an international perspective, it was also interesting to observe and understand both differences and similarities.

For the next school, I’m interested to see if it will be a similar reception, and how the next session for both schools will go- especially since it has more planning compared to this session’s games.

Finally, our research into the UK’s extracurricular policy and its impacts intrigues me. Our research direction has become more refined over the weeks, and the opportunity to get a glimpse of the UK’s policy landscape sounds incredibly exciting. In particular, we were surprised at the lack of national policy mandates, and I was further surprised by how much external organizations seemed to chip in. Coming from a hometown where in-school extracurriculars are mandated by the government and provided by the school, understanding that even the unlikeliest of external organizations, such the police force, funded certain in-school clubs was incredibly eye-opening. 

Looking forward to what we can do!