Brains, Computers and CogSci: the Quiet Revolution in Learning⤴

from @ robin_macp

This blog was written for the Voices in Education Series and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Odgers Berndtson.

This Spring Term the Schools Practice at Odgers Berndtson is pleased to present the second series of articles for its Voices in Education initiative. These articles are written by a number of leading voices across the schools sector. They have been written to start conversations about important challenges, opportunities and ideas within the schools sector today. In this article, Robin Macpherson, Assistant Rector at Dollar Academy, writes about the importance of understanding memory as teachers.

“Memory is the residue of thought”

Daniel T. Willingham

“The aim of all instruction is to alter long-term memory. If nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned.”

Sweller, Clark and Kirschner

I’m a teacher, not a psychologist. If you work in a school it’s unlikely that you know much about psychology either. It’s doubtful that you did any cognitive psychology in your training to be a teacher, as this is largely left off the curriculum. So why then should we all be spending a lot more time looking at cognitive psychology if we want to be better teachers?

The first thing to make clear is that this isn’t a new thing. It may be a recent addition to pedagogy in school classrooms but as a discipline it’s well over a hundred years old. Ebbinghaus produced seminal work on the ‘forgetting curve’ in the 1880s and 1890s, which showed that memory traces have a half-life, and in order to be strengthened we need to retrieve the memory to refresh and strengthen it. In 1967, Ulric Neisser wrote one of the most important books in education history, simply called ‘Cognitive Psychology’. In academic circles it pushed the science of learning more towards internal mental processes and away from behaviourism, which sought to explain learning through responses to external stimuli. Essentially, it means people in universities knew – more than half a century ago – that it was possible to measure brain processes in order to advance our knowledge of how we learn.

What accelerated this was the development of computer technology. It’s often said that our brains are like computers, but in fact it is more accurate to state that computers are like our brain. Cognitive psychology is about the architecture of memory: we process information through our working memory (which is very limited) and store it in our long term memory (which is potentially limitless). We can bring back information from storage into the working memory in order to use it. Computers process things (measured in RAM) but store things on a hard drive which is much bigger in scope. The analogy seems to work, even if it breaks down when you explore the mechanics, but there is no doubt that as we started to build artificial brains (computers) we developed a better understanding of our own minds.

Incredibly, it has only been in the past decade that scientific findings in the field of cognitive psychology have begun to shape classroom practice on a wider scale. This has much to do with the disconnect between the research that is produced in academia and the professional knowledge and practice of teachers. Thankfully, we’re getting much better at this.

The breakthrough can be attributed to a number of books but I think a key text is ‘Make it Stick’ by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel. In 2002, Henry Roediger was appointed to head up a team of eleven psychologists (including Mark McDaniel) by the James S McDonnell Foundation in St Louis, Missouri. Their task was to lead a study in applying cognitive psychology to educational practice. A decade later, their work was ready. However, unlike previous studies, this one made its way into mainstream education in schools. Roediger and McDaniel teamed up with journalist Peter Brown and wrote ‘Make It Stick’, and finally there was a volume that took high end, rigorous scientific research and made it accessible to teachers. It was a watershed moment.

There are many other books that we could point to here: Daniel Willingham’s ‘Why Don’t Students Like School?’ (2010) is arguably the true pioneer, and Benedict Carey’s ‘How We Learn’ (2014) is also wonderfully accessible. However, the overall point is clear: in the past decade the science of learning has infiltrated the classroom and this quiet revolution is to be embraced. If you are a teacher reading this and are thinking “I know nothing about cognitive psychology” then the good news is that you can get up to speed very quickly. You don’t need to be a scientist, you just need to open your mind and read one of these books. Another, more recent, classic is ‘Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide’ by Weinstein, Sumeracki and Caviglioli, who are members of the excellent Learning Scientists collaborative. Get on their website as soon as you have finished this blog.

So what does this actually mean for classroom practice? Crucially, it means structuring learning around the architecture of memory. Awareness of the limitations of working memory is vital. Current thinking is that we can hold at best 4 pieces of information in our working memory at a time, and to try to cram more into this will overload your pupils’ capacities – no matter how bright they are. When I started teaching less able pupils were described as those who had problems with working memory. Newsflash – we all do. None of us has a great working memory. This is why Dylan Wiliam described Sweller’s cognitive load theory as being the most important thing any teacher can know. I think about 95% of the PowerPoints I see teachers produce – and the way they deliver them – violate this key principle. There’s a brilliant blog entitled ‘Clean up your mess’ by Robert Macmillan (@robfmac on Twitter) based on his talks at researchED Scotland if you want to see how to do presentations properly.

RobfMac

Further evidence is provided in a key paper by Dunlosky et al in Scientific American Mind called ‘What works, what doesn’t’ (2013). This explores the methods used by students to revise for assessments and how effective they are. How often have you had a pupil bemoan a poor test score, pleading that they worked really hard? No doubt they did, but they used ineffective techniques. Using highlighters and rereading notes – beloved of many – are an almost total waste of time. Retrieval practice – known as the testing effect – is extremely effective. Teachers who make use of this in everyday lessons build highly effective long term memory and can achieve outstanding results with pupils of all ability ranges. This is important – it can be an absolute game-changer. If you want to know more, read Kate Jones’ excellent recent book ‘Retrieval Practice: Resources and Research for Every Classroom’ (2020).

So, what we’re faced with now are the massive opportunities afforded by over a century of scientific research, all of which is very actionable in the classroom. As I mentioned before, most universities completely ignore it in their teacher training programmes. I am hugely in favour of connecting research about education to the practice of teachers, and things are moving in this direction. However, it is a slow burn process and if you’re a school leader you will need to think carefully about how to embed this in the culture of learning in your unique context. A whole school approach works much better than individuals ploughing lonely furrows. My advice is to get reading, share with colleagues, and see the benefits for yourself. Teaching, in truth, is not a fully research-informed profession. Cognitive psychology shows us what might be possible if we can connect schools and universities in a genuine partnership about the science of learning.

Robin Macpherson is currently Assistant Rector at Dollar Academy, and from August 2020 will be Head of College at Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen. He is the co-author of ‘What does this look like in the classroom? Bridging the gap between research and practice’ (2017) with Carl Hendrick and speaks and blogs about educational issues. His Twitter handle is @robin_macp. 

The vital important of timing – for teachers and lecturers⤴

from @ Memory & Education Blog - Jonathan Firth

Learning is not just about content, but also about timing. Image via Pixabay

It’s important that our students remember what we teach them. That is why we do it, right?

I bet you give some talks, classes or lectures where you explain your material really well. You have nice slides, you give an eloquent and passionate account of the material, and most of it is pretty interesting. The thing is – how much will your learners remember in a few weeks time?

The psychology of human memory can help us to answer this question. We know several key things about forgetting:

  1. It progresses very rapidly.

  2. Abstract information and specific details are forgotten more rapidly than meaningful information and gist.

  3. Consolidation is very important if learning is to last over the long term – and so is the timing of this consolidation.

  4. Learners and teachers alike tend to misjudge many aspects of how memory works. It is not intuitive.

Let’s consider each of these four issues in turn.

Forgetting is fast

A classic finding in experimental psychology – dating back over one hundred years – is the forgetting curve. This shows that forgetting moves quickly at first, and then slows down. Most of the forgetting that takes place is likely to happen in the first few hours or days.

However, at the very beginning – during or straight after your class or lecture – learners still remember quite a lot. They may not even perceive that forgetting is happening. And for that reason, they may fail to do anything about it.

The good news is that if learners still remember information and ideas after a few weeks, they will probably also remember it months later – at the time of their exam, for example.

But the bad news is that they won’t remember all that much by that point if they have failed to do any consolidation. This means that when it comes to their exam revision, they will be starting from scratch in some areas. They may not even remember having heard the information in their notes.

Details are lost more quickly than gist

A complicating factor is that not all types of information are forgotten at the same speed.

You may have the experience of hearing an anecdote and joke, and then trying to remember or re-tell it the following day. What do you remember? Probably you do remember the overall point, they key ideas or punchline, but what you retrieve from memory will not be word-for-word identical to what you originally heard. You remembered the gist but not the details.

It’s the same for your students. They will remember key meaningful ideas quite well, but forget the details (unless they take some effective action to retain those – more on that next). And this makes it more likely that their memories will be distorted, and that misconceptions about the material will take hold.

Well-timed consolidation IS IMPORTANT

You might be thinking at this point that every teacher should ensure that they repeat what they have said very soon – perhaps the very next day, or even say it several times within the same lecture to stave off forgetting.

But that wouldn’t actually help very much.

If things are rapidly repeated, the forgetting still proceeds rapidly from that point on. It’s like cramming for a test – it’s helpful in the short-term, but the information is still likely to be forgotten over a longer timescale.

What would help would be to time consolidation better – delaying each repetition until the material was on the point of being forgotten.

The spacing effect is a well-documented effect in human memory. It shows that practice which is delayed and spaced out over time is more effective than intensive practice. A delayed practice session can be twice as effective, and practice which comes very soon – immediately after initial learning – can sometimes have almost no effect at all (Dempster, 1988).

Consider some practical examples of this:

If you are practicing a musical piece three times, it would be better to do this on three separate days than three times on the same day.

When re-reading information, it would have more of an effect to do this after a delay (when the information has been almost forgotten) than immediately after reading it the first time (an exception is if you didn’t understand it the first time, in which case re-reading the text soon would be useful).

It would be better to split a long study session into two or more parts, rather than trying to take everything in in a single day.

If a student is running through some flashcards, testing themselves on a key topic for their course, it would be best to repeat the flashcards a week later (at least, once they are starting to get the answers right) rather than straight away.

What all of these examples show is that a delayed review is more effective than intensive practice. Spacing works. However, learners often fail to realise this! Which leads us on to the final issue:

Learners and teachers alike tend to misjudge forgetting

This is well demonstrated by a classic experiment by Eugene Zechmeister and John Shaughnessy, entitled ‘When you know that you know and when you think that you know but you don’t.’

In the study, college students were shown words twice, with the repetition coming either straight away (‘massed’) or after a delay (‘distributed’). The distributed condition led to better recall, but most students incorrectly believed that they were more likely to remember words that had been repeated in a massed fashion (Zechmeister & Shaughnessy, 1980).

This error is found in the world outside of the psychology lab, too. In a large-scale survey, 56% of university students reported studying “whatever is due soonest”, and only 23% reported returning to review material after a course/module had ended. 53% said that they did most of their study in a single session before a test/exam. These findings showed that flawed ideas about effective spacing of one’s learning are widespread – and the researchers also found that these flawed habits were linked to lower grade point averages (Hartwig & Dunlosky, 2012). Poor judgement of learning and forgetting can have a real effect on how well students do at school and university.

Some practical suggestions

What can we do to build in more effective consolidation in lectures and seminars? Here are some practical suggestions:

  • If you give a lecture once per week, begin the lecture with review questions. To make good use of time, these could be displayed during the period when students are still arriving in the room.

  • Break lectures up with further review questions based on the new material, for example by asking them about something 10 or 15 minutes after you explained it. Even such a short delay is useful for new learning, and the breaks will also to boost concentration, which often flags mid-way through a lecture.

  • Make clear links back to older topics. Ideally these will prompt learners to actively think about and recall what they learned previously, rather than being (passively) told the information again.

  • Longer topics could be offset across weeks, rather than covering a single topic in one week. For example, when I am teaching theories of learning, we spend the first 30 minutes or so of a seminar reviewing and consolidating the previous week’s topic, before moving on to the new topic.

  • Homework, review sessions, assignments, and tutorials could likewise be offset, practicing material from a previous week rather than working on what was covered most recently. For example, of you give a lecture on DNA in the first week of your course, you could set a tutorial task on that topic to take place not in week 1 but in week 3 or 4.

  • In classes and tutorials, set tasks that don’t just practice new material but integrate older material too. This could involve asking students to comment on the similarities and differences between the current topic and the previous one, or to do an applied project task that draws on several topics.

  • Review things more than once. Provided that the material has been well understood, two short reviews will be more effective than one long one (because you are in effect spacing out the second half of the review; in contrast, continuing to practise beyond the point of mastery (‘overlearning’) is ineffective (Roher & Taylor, 2006).

  • Guide students towards using more effective study habits in their independent study (see this post with more details on how to study effectively, as well as the flawed strategies that should be avoided). Flawed beliefs about learning and forgetting mean that most learners will not adopt these strategies spontaneously.

Such changes can make a real difference. And the great thing about applying the spacing effect to your teaching and lecturing is that it can have a large effect without requiring much of a change. Your materials and teaching can stay much the same – all that changes is the timing.

Do remember, however, that learners may not intuitively see the benefit of delays. It is worth taking the time to explain to them that while delayed practice and review questions are challenging, they will help them to retain the material effectively over the long term.

Good luck, and happy scheduling!

  • For more on applying the spacing effect to all aspects of classroom teaching, see my book Psychology in the Classroom, especially chapter 1.

  • For more on effective study habits, my short guide How to Learn is aimed at school and early university students, and covers studying, note-taking, revision and much more.

References

Dempster, F. N. (1988). The spacing effect: A case study in the failure to apply the results of psychological research. American Psychologist, 43(8), 627-634.

Rohrer, D., & Taylor, K. (2006). The effects of overlearning and distributed practise on the retention of mathematics knowledge. Applied Cognitive Psychology: The Official Journal of the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 20(9), 1209-1224.

Zechmeister, E. B., & Shaughnessy, J. J. (1980). When you know that you know and when you think that you know but you don’t. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 15(1), 41-44.

Celebrating the 5th anniversary of the Scottish Attainment Challenge – A blog from our Chief Executive⤴

from @ Education Scotland's Learning Blog

It is incredible to me that it has now been five years since the Scottish Attainment Challenge launched. Those five years may have passed quickly but in that time, I have seen so much excellent work taking place across the country with the aim of closing the attainment gap.

The Challenge proactively aims to ensure that every child has the same opportunity to succeed regardless of their background and circumstances – and many schools have taken a really inventive approach in helping to make this important vision a reality.

I am very impressed by the variety of actions being undertaken by schools across the country to help increase attainment. There is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach to tackling this as sometimes what works for the many will not make a difference for our most vulnerable children.

Many schools are focusing on increasing attainment by considering what happens outside of the school gates by involving parents, developing home-school links, and increasing community support through outreach projects. For example, I was delighted to learn about the work being undertaken at Wallace High School through the Scottish Attainment Challenge to recruit Family Link Workers which support young people and their family, and help them to overcome barriers preventing them from attending school.

Whilst it is fantastic to see this kind of work coming forward, the 5th anniversary provides a useful opportunity to reflect on progress made but also what we need to do next.
We want to accelerate progress, evaluate what has worked well and how we can best drive forward further improvements to narrow the poverty related attainment gap. We want to see even more success stories across the country.

I would like to say a huge thank you to the Attainment Advisors from Education Scotland who have been working in schools across Scotland to support the delivery of the Scottish Attainment Challenge since its launch five years ago. They play a strong role in linking the work of Education Scotland, Scottish Government and Local Authorities to improve educational attainment and to reduce the attainment gap between children from the least and most socially disadvantaged backgrounds.

Reducing the attainment gap is not possible without the many hardworking and dedicated teachers and classroom assistants across Scotland, and I also want to acknowledge and thank them for their efforts in helping to tackle this. I was very interested to learn about the partnership work being undertaken in Renfrewshire through the Challenge to devise and deliver a comprehensive professional learning programme for classroom assistants. This is incredible work and underlines the significant contribution our classroom assistants make to increasing attainment.

We now need to continue to focus on pedagogy, engagement and on developing an irresistible curriculum for our children. There are many children who are not yet where they need to be in terms of attainment but through taking a targeted approach to their lessons, and considering where the gaps in their learning are, teachers are helping these children to become more confident and ensuring they maximise their potential.

Change doesn’t happen overnight and research suggests that educational change can be a marathon rather than a sprint, but I am very encouraged by the strong steps forward which have been made since the launch of the Scottish Attainment Challenge five years ago. With the continued commitment and focus of all key players in the educational system I believe that together we can achieve equity for every child.

Gayle Gorman

Re-reading Manifestos⤴

from @ education

I'm definitely overdue a number of blog posts about where the heck I am and what I'm doing these days. I'm in week 7 of a new role as Deputy Provost of Athabasca University and week 8 of living in a whole new country. My … Continue reading Re-reading Manifestos

Office for iOS⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Office for iOS

The new Office app simplifies how you work on a phone by combining Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into one app and adds mobile-first features so you can get more done all from one app. This app maintains all the functionality of the existing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint mobile apps but requires far less phone storage than using three separate apps. New features leveraging the camera help you create content in uniquely mobile ways. Additionally, the app includes a new Actions tab so you can accomplish many common mobile tasks without needing to switch between apps.

Works with Glow’s O365 education accounts.

I don’t use office apps on my phone very often except for office lens.
This looks like an interesting development.
The quote above was grabbed with the Image to text function. This seems less powerful than Lens (no immersive reader) but allows you to copy text without a trip to OneDrive/Word which is handy. For my use, as opposed to pupil’s, it should be more useful.

Threads That Connect Us⤴

from

In my post about my Open World femedtech quilt square I explained why I chose to make my square out of Harris Tweed, a protected fabric that is only made in the Outer Hebrides where I was born and brought up. In many ways the fabric is emblematic of both the islands and the islanders; the wool is shorn from the local black face sheep, the colours, traditionally from natural dyes, reflect the colours of the landscape, and the cloth is woven by hand to produce a fabric that is unique, beautiful and hard wearing.  As with many traditional fabrics, tweed production was originally a communal activity, and much of the work was undertaken by women; from dyeing and spinning the wool, to weaving the tweed, to waulking and finishing the cloth.  Waulking involved soaking and beating the tweed to remove dirt and impurities, and soften and shrink the cloth. Before tweed mills were built in the islands to process the hand-woven cloth, finishing a tweed was a social activity as much as a collective task.

This following account of the importance of waulking as a women’s social activity, comes from a Gaelic radio programme called Tigh Mo Sheanair (My Grandfather’s House) which was recorded in the early 1970s and the speaker is my grandmother, Anne Campbell, who was born in 1909 and lived in Harris all her life.  Her words were translated from the Gaelic by her daughter, my aunt.

Anne Campbell & Sybil McInnes

“The entertainment whilst waulking the tweed was better than a wedding, for us anyway when we were young, especially if the waulking took place in the evening.  If the waulking was in the morning we had to come home afterwards and stay in in the evening.  Waulking was sometimes our only entertainment.  We were always delighted when we got news that someone in the village was about to complete a tweed.  In those days it was the women who wove the tweed on the “little loom”.  A tweed would take three weeks to complete – today a tweed is completed in one day using an automatic loom.

To waulk the tweed a long table was set out with seating for four women on each side.  There was a tub at either end of the table. The tweed was cut into two pieces and a piece dropped in each tub.  One side worked left the right and the other right to left.

For a bit of fun the loose coloured threads at the end of the tweed were cut and each woman would put her thread outside the door. If your thread was the first one then the first man who came to the house had to see you home that evening.  It did not matter if you had a steady boyfriend, it was who ever found your thread that had to take you home.  There was often good-natured bantering outside the house especially if your own boyfriend turned up expecting to walk you home. We didn’t think anything of being up all night if there was a waulking.”

Although my granny wasn’t a weaver, she did spin and dye her own wool, which she used to knit socks, jerseys and other garments.  When I was a child, there was a huge cast iron cauldron wedged in the rocks outside the house, which had been used for dying wool before modern conveniences came along.  The remains are still there today.

This communal aspect of fabric production, sewing, embroidering, and quilting has always been important.  It provides women with a space where, to some extent, they are in control of their own labour. A space where they can come together to share their skill, pass on their craft, tell their stories, and enjoy each other’s company.  These spaces sometimes seem to stand outside the strictures and expectations of “normal” society, and provide women with a space where they set their own rules.   To my mind this has been the most powerful aspect of the femedtech quilt project, which has given so many women from all over the world, a space to collaborate, to share their skills, their stories, their inspiration and their creativity.

I’m writing this post with Frances and Suzanne in mind who will be coming together this weekend to sew the femedtechquilt, and although all those of us who sent in squares won’t be able to join them in person, I hope they’ll feel the strength of the threads that bind this amazing community together.

New work with the Credential Engine⤴

from @ Sharing and learning

Credential Engine logoI am delighted to be starting a new consulting project through Cetis LLP with the Credential Engine, helping them make credentials more transparent in order to empower everyone to make more informed decisions about credentials and their value. The problem that the Credential Engine sets out to solve is that there are (at the last count) over 730,000 different credentials on offer in the US alone. [Aside: let me translate ‘credential’ before going any further; in this context we mean what in Europe we call an educational qualification, from school certificates through to degrees, including trade and vocational qualifications and microcredentials.] For many of these credentials it is difficult to know their value in terms of who recognises them, the competences that they certify, and the occupations they are relevant for. This problem is especially acute in the relatively deregulated US, but it is also an issue when we have learner and worker mobility and need to recognise credentials from all over the world.

The Credential Engine sets out to alleviate this problem by making the credentials more transparent through a Credential Registry. The registry holds linked data descriptions of credentials being offered, using the Credential Transparency Description Language, CTDL, which is based largely on schema.org. (Note that neither the registry nor CTDL deals with information relating to whether an individual holds any credential.) These descriptions include links to Competence Frameworks described in the Credential Engine’s profile of the Achievement Standards Network vocabulary, CTDL-ASN. The registry powers a customizable Credential Finder service as well as providing a linked data platform and an API for partners to develop their own services–there are presentations about some example thrid-party apps on the Credential Engine website.

I have been involved with the Credential Engine since the end of 2015, when it was the Credential Transparency Initiative, and have since worked with them to strengthen the links between the CTDL and schema.org by leading a W3C Community Group to add EducationalOccupationalCredentials ot schema.org. I’ve also helped represent them at a UNESCO World Reference Level expert group meeting, helped partners interested in using data from the registry at an appathon in Indianapolis.  I have come to appreciate that there is a great team behind the Credential Engine, and I am really looking forward to continuing to work with them. I hope to post regular updates here on the new work as we progress.

There are strong linkages between this work and the other main project I have on talent marketplace signalling, and with talent pipeline management in general; and also with other areas of interest such as course description  and with work of the rest of Cetis in curriculum analytics and competency data standards. This new project isn’t exclusive so I will continue to work in those areas.  Please get in touch if you would like to know more about partnering with the Credential Engine or are interested in the wider work.

The post New work with the Credential Engine appeared first on Sharing and learning.

wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display 2020-02-21 06:53:20⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

St Luke’s pupils have designs on successful careers⤴

from @ Education Scotland's Learning Blog

Pupils at a Barrhead school have been getting results by ditching traditional maths-based learning in favour of more hands-on classroom work.

A pilot group of S2 pupils at St Luke’s High achieved impressive scores in a new Design, Engineer and Construct (DEC) course – the first ones to do so in East Renfrewshire. The DEC is a new qualification that offers teachers and learners the opportunity to develop a range of skills and knowledge fundamental to technical and professional aspects of the construction and built environment industry.

With support from local industry experts, each pupil had the responsibility of creating a proposal for a new eco-classroom to be situated on the grounds of St Luke’s High. Although it was all conceptual, pupils worked with various industry partners to create detailed proposals that would later be presented to the local community for consultation. Karen Hunter, depute headteacher at St Luke’s High, is full of praise for the young students, some of whom received a merit for their hard work.

“Approaching the curriculum creatively is a massive part of the St Luke’s culture,” she told the Barrhead News. “The group of pupils successfully passed the course, with a number of them receiving a merit for their hard work and dedication. “Well done from everyone at St Luke’s High.”

Kevin Ormond, principal teacher of STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) at St Luke’s High, started the alternative curriculum two years ago in the hope of inspiring youngsters to pursue a career in the construction industry once they leave school. Among the companies to have supported the process as partners are BAM Construction, Gardiner & Theobald and Threesixty Architecture. St Luke’s High is the first school in East Renfrewshire to run the DEC qualification, which is comparable to that of a National 4 and National 6 certificate.
It is not a SQA-awarded national qualification but candidates are awarded credit points for potential credit transfer onto further study if required.

Marine Engineering Workshop⤴

from @ Education Scotland's Learning Blog

The Marine Engineering STEM Workshop was chosen to receive the Maritime UK STEM Award for 2019. The award recognizes the quality, hard work and dedication of the team in delivering workshops and promoting DYW and STEM as a route into engineering for pupils in schools throughout Scotland. Since starting the program 4 years ago, they have delivered the workshop to more than 26,000 pupils nationwide.

They have developed a new marine environmental engineering workshop that looks at our ocean plastics problem and how students and engineers can help to save our world’s marine wildlife. The workshop culminates in the students building a working submarine with the ability to retrieve materials from the ocean floor.

Their diary is now open for 2020/21/22 and they would like to give all Scottish schools the opportunity to book their free workshop.

MEP JP Buoyancy Workshop Flyer