Inspire Virtual Summer Schools in review
Last week, we coordinated our first ever Virtual Summer
Schools for students enrolled on our Pre-GCSE, Year 11 and Year 12 Inspire
Programmes. In addition to virtual tours of St John’s College and Oxford’s
museums, including the chance to contribute to an upcoming exhibition at the
Museum of Natural History, each year group had its own schedule of academic
tasters and tasks across various subjects to complete.
Year 9s on the Pre-GCSE Inspire Programme explored the power of volcanoes through articles across various subjects provided by St John’s College tutors, and then competed in a series of competitions based on this material. Students also completed a series of virtual debating activities courtesy of the UK Parliament Learning Team, and tackled some backyard biodiversity and conservation tasks. The timetable and all academic material from the week will remain available here.
Students on the Year 11 Inspire Programme chose between a series of STEM or Humanities academic taster sessions, produced by St John’s College tutors and students. While our Year 11s did not compete in any competitions this week, we did announce winners of the final Year 11 competition which took place in June, to cap off a year of fantastic work submitted by our cohort of nearly 600 participants. You can find the summer school timetable, material and competition winners here.
Participants on the Year 12 Inspire Programme competed in a series of daily competitions: Humanities students considered a series of “Big Questions” from Oxplore, while STEM students tackled a series of maths puzzles, with video solutions provided by Dr Tom Crawford. In addition to these daily challenges, our students also worked throughout the week on an academic poster project tackling the complex topic of fake news. The timetable for the STEM strand is available here, and for the Humanities strand here.
Congratulations to our Virtual Summer Schools competition winners!
We are excited to announce the winners of the Virtual Summer School competitions! With nearly 100 excellent entries submitted across the various competitions, we had some difficult decisions to make! Click the links below to explore the winning entries to our Year 9 and Year 12 Virtual Summer School competitions.
Click here to see the Year 9 winners!
Click here to see the Year 12 winners!
Thank you!
Thank you so much to everyone who participated in our Inspire Virtual Summer Schools! We are so proud of the hard work and dedication our students have shown during this difficult year, and their flexibility in adapting to new digital versions of the Inspire Programme. We very much look forward to continuing to work with our Pre-GCSE Inspire Programme students as they move on into Year 10. For our Year 11 and Year 12 students, we wish you all the best in your future studies, and remember you can always get in touch with us at inspire@sjc.ox.ac.uk if you have any questions. Between the expansion of resources on Inspire Digital, and the continued availability of the Virtual Summer Schools material, we hope you continue to find our website useful as you move on in your education.
A huge thank you to all St John’s College students and tutors who contributed material to our Virtual Summer Schools this year – last week’s programme would not have been possible without you!
We’re very proud of everything we’ve achieved together this year, and we look forward to doing even greater things with the Inspire Programme next year!
