Education Programme 19/20
End of term report
During 2019/20 academic year, we worked with students at two local STEAM Hub schools (that’s Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths), Regent High School and Parliament Hill School, to deliver our second Education Programme. 🎨📚🏫🏗️✏️
Thanks to the support of The Span Trust, John Lyon’s Charity and our brilliant community of Camden Highliners, we were able to deliver a series of workshops to 40 pupils across Camden. We worked with Urban Learners to help give Camden’s young people the skills and opportunities to play a part in the borough’s thriving creative, digital and scientific economy in the future.
Although COVID-19 restrictions unfortunately left us unable to complete the final two workshops — it was fantastic to see the young people progress throughout the programme. The Highline cuts across all STEAM subjects and beyond, making it the perfect real-world learning project for the students to work together and share knowledge and skills.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the incredible volunteers who signed up for the second round of our Education Programme, along with the amazing pupils who got involved. We were overwhelmed by the response of 80 volunteers offering their time to help with the scheme — it wouldn’t have been possible without you!
So, what have we been doing?
We completed five out of seven workshops at each school, including a site visit to architect studios Sheppard Robson and Haworth Tompkins.
Thank you to Luke O’Donovan for the images below!
We kicked off the Education Programme by exploring the Highline route at various scales, resulting in the students creating a collaborative 1:100 scale map of the Highline to understand its context. The students were then introduced to bridge structures to understand the bridge-heavy nature of the Highline. Working in teams, they followed instructions to build model bridges that were tested for strength.
This was followed by a site visit to Camden Gardens, the Highline’s starting point, where the students explored through a variety of measuring activities. The students then took to an Overground journey to understand the relationship between the Highline and the city, recorded through photographs. To finish the day, we visited local architecture practices for a mini-tour and sketching workshops with the architects and volunteers.
From here, the young people gathered their ‘discovery’ materials (maps, measurements, photographs) to begin more detailed mapping and narrative activities.
Presented in their concertina sketchbooks, these maps became the basis for quick model-making activities. The students photographed their 3D concept journeys using GoPro style cameras.
What now?
The final two workshops would have seen the students focus on designing infrastructure or activity for a certain section of the Camden Highline in pairs, however they unfortunately had to be cancelled. We are hopeful that the scheme will continue to play a key role in the future of Camden Highline, potentially returning in 2021 or being revisited through a public exhibition — please let us know if you’ve got any ideas!
We had fantastic feedback and responses from the pupils and their teachers, who were all a pleasure to work with. It’s been amazing to see the student’s progression and we hope they enjoyed the experience as much as we have!
