We tendered and we got it! -NESTA idiscover

Suklaa have a fantastic network of people that we work with and Claudia Barwell is an example of someone who quite simply makes our lives better. Claudia is a project and events manager extraordinaire, she’s organised, inspiring and a master of charm. (She’s also quite posh.)

Darina (Co-Director of Suklaa) and Claudia recently teamed up and put together a tender for the idiscover Programme Manager post for Nesta (National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts). We are very excited to say that we were successful!

The idiscover programme is happening in London and Manchester- over the next two years- and we are working with the London Schools who are all part of The Harris Federation in South East London. idiscover is all about developing the innovative capacity of young people by giving them access to a vast range of experiences produced by dynamic learning providers. The programme will put power into the hands of young people and aims to foster some of the skills essential for innovation such as creativity, self-belief, energy, leadership and risk-taking within the cohort of students.

We’re expecting great things!

Links:
Nesta
The Harris Federation
idiscover -website

About Nesta:

NESTA is the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts – a unique body with a mission to make the UK more innovative. We invest in early-stage companies, inform and shape policy, and deliver practical programmes that inspire others to solve the big challenges of the future.

Last week, I did a workshop at BBC Blast for teachers looking for new ways to reach students. We talked about new technologies that are available on the Internet and about podcasting. Here’s the slides I used during the workshop.

(Also available as a downloadable PDF: BBC Blast Workshop.pdf)

-kristian

So here it is! The new improved Suklaa website!
We needed a better way of sharing all the great projects that we’ve worked on, all those photographs we’ve made and the people we’ve met on the way. A website that keeps growing with us, day by day. I believe we’re getting there. We’ve made it really easy for us to add content on the site, so as soon as we finish something we can share the results. It’s nice to finally be able to show really large photographs on the site. 600 px by 600 px just didn’t cut it anymore. These look really good (even if I do say so myself!), hopefully the next best to seeing them printed.

A few tit-bits about using the site:

We’re structuring it around the three main categories you can see on the front page; Media, Education and Blog. There’s often some overlap between media and education so we’ll do are best to keep them in the right categories. The blog is a space to talk about other things that are going on that more or less relate to what we do. I will most likely have some screencasts and tips how to make things and talk about techniques that I find useful. I’m also planning on doing a ‘making of’ write up of the Tapes video. If you want to keep up to date on what’s happening, grab our RSS feed by clicking here.

And the technical award goes to…

Although, the website itself is designed in-house, we do need to thank Wordpress for providing the back-end. Wordpress is a great blogging platform / CMS that is a joy to use. Sandbox is the theme used to provide framework and basis for our own custom design, so thanks to Andy and Scott for creating it!

One more thing

On the left you can see a few photographs from our recent trip to New Zealand (click to make them bigger). These and many others will be available to purchase from our forthcoming online store, Suklaa Editions. If you wish to be notified when this is ready, please click here to receive a notification email.

Stay tuned!

Kristian

Project Title:’Bridging the Gap’
Funding: Creative Partnerships
GAP
School:Gable Hall School, Corringham, Essex
Suklaa Roles: Producer, Documentation- video/ photography

Description:
‘Bridging the Gap’ focused on young people’s relationships with what they wear both in and out of school. 50 students at Gable Hall School took part in this social experiment project- where they first discussed their personal style outside of school and to what extent their clothes expressed their personalities.

Weekend Uniforms
All the participating students were given a ‘weekend uniform’ consisting of straight blue jeans and plain white T-shirts- on a saturday they all wore them and were asked to remove any makeup/ jewelry etc we went to Lakeside Shopping Centre (a place they’d normally hang out during weekends) – they recorded info relating to how they felt, how other people reacted to them- as well as taking images and notes of relating to the fashion around them.

Personal Style
During the second phase of the project- three fashion designers and printmakers came in to work with the students- to help them alter their jeans and T-shirts in anyway the wanted to best fit what they felt was their personal style. The following saturday the students wore the new outfits and went back to the shopping centre to again record the results.

Market Place
In the final stage students worked in groups to create mini-business and designed and made one new outfit from the jeans and white T-shirt base- their brief was to create an outfit that they felt would best appeal to their immediate market (the whole school community 1200 students). The groups put together a pitch for their designs and organised a catwalk show and presentation in which their audience voted and the group with the most votes won.

Few quotes from partisipating teachers and students:
‘This was a fantastic project- it really helped the students to understand fashion design, branding and marketing- they created some brilliant work‘. (Teacher Gable Hall School)
‘I loved meeting the designers- their work was great! I want to be in fashion when I’m older and now I think I can do it!‘ (Gable Hall Student)
‘It was really hard to wear the blank t-shirt and jeans on our first trip to Lakeside- I felt boring and bland- I want to wear clothing that represents who I am‘ (Gable Hall Student).

Project Title:’The Learning Town’
Funding: Nimble Fish, Creative Partnerships, Southend Education Trust
Suklaa Role: Associate Producer

The Learning Town Project is a creative programme designed to explore innovative ideas in teaching and learning.
13 Southend Schools are taking part. Each school has an individual project and young people, teachers & creative professionals will work
collaboratively to make their exciting ideas happen. This work witll culminate with a huge public event on 2nd July 2009.
This event will be open to the entire community. Nimble Fish have been commissioned to do this work by The Southend Education Trust &Creative Partnerships.

Project Title:Landmark Link
Funding/Organisation: Future Creative
Schools: Longfield Academy
Suklaa Role: Creative Practitioner

Description:
This project is the education and community link to the Ebsfleet Landmark Project- in which a 50 metre high installation was commissioned for a site in Ebsfleet, Kent. 5 leading artists were asked to create proposals- Mark Wallinger’s Horse proposal has recently won. We worked closely with a Longfield Academy which is nearby to the site in Ebsfleet to investigate what site specific work is, to create art pieces and to engage with the community to explore how this huge art piece will effect the area.

Project Title:‘New Views’
Funding: National Theatre
Suklaa Roles: Workshop Leader, Photographer

This project involved creating and running workshops for young people from schools all over London on theme of Importance of the Image- this was part of the New Views Programme- run by National Theatre Education Department. We also worked with the students to create images for their publicity and we took portraits of each participant which were projected during their final performances in the National Theatre.

Project Title:’Reaching Out’
Funding: Creative Partnerships
The British Council
Stifford Clays Junior School
Schools: Stifford Clays Junior School, Grays, Essex
Pukllasunchis School, Cusco, Peru
Suklaa Roles: Creative Agent, Video production, website design/production

Description:
Reaching Out is about widening horizons and celebrating the diversity and similarities we share with students and teachers all over the world. From our lead CP school- Stifford Clays in Essex we created links with schools in Australia, Japan and Peru. We put together a joint project called ‘The Global Games Exchange’ where young people in each country shared their favourite games with all the participants. To develop this relationship we were lucky enough to secure British Council Funding to send 2 teachers and CP practitioners to Cusco to meet and work directly with our Peruvian partners. Peruvian staff are due to visit SCJ later this year. The learning from our joint work has exceeded all expectations- staff and creative practitioners were energised and inspired by this brilliant opportunity which has widened their perspectives in relation to teaching and learning.