By Anthony Story

An important thing to remember is that there are two audiences; the teacher and the student. Teachers, while being constantly bombarded with new resources and initiatives, are still always open to new and interesting ways of delivering the curriculum and engaging their students – who are the people we needed to reach.

And how do you engage a 15 year old in a topic they show no interest in? In our case, the answer was through creativity.

If you take business studies as a topic, for example, chances are a 15 year old might struggle with their interest in supply and demand. So, on one hand, we could create an interactive tool which takes students through the curriculum stages step-by-step; alternatively we could develop a game which, although doesn’t adhere to the curriculum precisely, covers a lot of the right ground.

In developing the Make It website (www.makeit.org.uk), we needed interactivity which young people would want to consume - to get the message across that manufacturing offered some very rewarding careers. We also realised that this is of very little interest to the average student, so we identified that we would have to reach them through their teachers.

The research we undertook with the teachers was interesting. Teachers want to teach, they don’t want to be merely conduits of other people’s lessons – whether interactive or not. By providing appealing interactive tools, with a loose interpretation of the curriculum, it allows the teacher enough freedom to be creative themselves as to how they deliver the content.

For us this was great. It meant we could be very creative in our approach to the themes around manufacturing; use media formats that young people like – i.e. video and games – and hype up products they identified with – trainers, iPods and PlayStations.

We could then map out the how the content we’d created relates to different sections of the curriculum, and provide teachers with some genuinely creative tools, which support their lessons, but allow them still to do what they do best, which is teach.

In our case the approach seems to be working. A month after launch the teacher resource area is the third most visited area on MakeIt.org.uk with schools all over the UK (and much to our surprise, as far afield as Australia and Japan) downloading the resources. Of course there’s a place for interactive curriculum delivery; but with teachers feeling increasingly under pressure, we discovered a palpable sense of relief at having access to useful tools which still allowed them the freedom to use their own brains.

About the author

Anthony Story is managing director of Junction K. His background is 20+ years producing, writing and directing new media, old media and marketing projects. Increasingly, on recent projects, he does all of this at the same time. You can contact him through the email: anthony@junctionk.co.uk. Junction K is a full-service, strategic media communications agency, which produces integrated web, interactive, mobile, video and marketing.

www.junctionk.co.uk