The Tyne Project

From Monday 13th June students at Cramlington Learning Village in the North East of England are having a week where their normal timetable will be suspended. During this week they will be choosing from a wide range of arts based projects. During the course of the week they will visit The Tyne and create pieces of art stimulated by our local river.

The hope is that this project will do two things:

• Give students a rich experience and help them to develop their artistic and creative skills

• To help them connect to their cultural heritage, using the river as an access point to our regions rich history.

We will then publicly exhibit our art and learning in school on Saturday 25th June so that there is an authentic audience for our work.
We will we be using our blog and our twitter feed @tyneproject as another way to exhibit our learning and then there is the exciting use of QR codes to link to our students' work.


We are placing a number of QR codes along the length of the Tyne so that you can be 'in situ' on the banks of the Tyne and use a smartphone to view the art that our students have created.


Students will begin tweeting and blogging from Sunday 5th June, when a small group of students will cycle along the Tyne to gather stories, photographs and video. These will be used as a stimulus for the whole year 7 cohort in a launch assembly on Thursday 9th June, during which we also hope to have a Skype link to Nagarjuna Academy, our partner school in Nepal, where students from Kathmandu can tell our students about the human importance of their great river, The Bagmati.


'I think that it's a good way of getting children to learn about the history of Newcastle and the Tyne.  It's not just learning in a classroom, we're using Arts to help us explore stories.'


'The QR barcodes are different and eye catching, it great because you can show your work to more people.  I'm really looking forward to cycling down the Tyne as this will be a really active way to learn.'

(Two student perspectives on what we hope to achieve with the project)

This project has been influenced by our involvement with both Learning Futures and High Tech High. Below are the slides I used to present this project to a Project Tuning Panel at High Tech High in San Diego earlier this year. Thanks especially to Rob Riordan and Laura McBain.

Tyne Project - Project Tuning (High Tech High)

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