Last year, we had over 1,800 pupils from across the UK take part in our programme, and this year we are inviting even more Critical Thinkers to join in! Inspire Critical Thinking is a free online course run by St John’s College and Somerville College in collaboration with Oxford for South East, and open to…
Category: Pre-GCSE
The Inspire Scholars Programme for Years 9, 10 & 11 – Early enrolment now open for Pilot Programme schools!
We are delighted to open enrolment for the Inspire Scholars Programme for Years 9, 10 & 11 to the schools from Ealing and Harrow that participated in our three-year pilot programme! The Inspire Scholars Programme for Years 9, 10 & 11 is a pioneering, sustained-contact opportunity for students aged 13-16. The programme has been collaboratively…
Leisure and technological change
As culture has evolved, so has the way we spend our leisure time. Dr Severine Toussaert investigates how the evolution of technology has impacted our leisure time – and how the digital economy affects the leisure economy.
Adaptation
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection states that the adaptations of an organism to its environment arise because of the greater chance of survival of those offspring that have a favourable variation caused by random mutation, which they then pass on to their offspring.
Language Evolution
Evolution occurs in culture as well as in the natural world. One example of this is language evolution.
The domino problem
Try your hand at this Maths brainteaser about dominoes!
Did volcanoes kill the dinosaurs?
Scroll to the bottom of the page for today’s task! It’s the age-old question – how did the dinosaurs die out? What if volcanic activity was responsible for their extinction? And are we heading for another mass extinction today? Step back 66 million years and try to uncover the answers to these questions and the…
Telling the time with volcanoes
Scroll to the bottom of the page for today’s task! It’s not all gushing lava and pyroclastic flows – sometimes the excitement of volcanoes lasts long after they erupt, in the form of radioactive rocks! Find out how radioactive decay and preserved ash can be used to date volcanic eruptions… Dating volcanic eruptions For geographers…
The power of Vesuvius in the ancient world
Scroll to the bottom of the page for today’s task! The eruption of Vesuvius has led to an interesting combination of destruction and preservation… Although the volcano buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, this means they are very well preserved. But recently they’ve come under threat from more destruction thanks to human activity. So…
Eruptions and transformations: volcanoes in poetry and songs
Scroll to the bottom of the page for today’s task! Volcanoes, plate tectonics and Roman gods – not necessarily your standard subjects for poems or songs… Read on to discover where the word ‘volcano’ comes from, and what volcanoes have come to signify in literature and music – and have a go at writing your…
The power of volcanoes in art
What can volcanoes signify in art? Sometimes the aim is just to show volcanoes informatively, some artists want to explore their cultural significance, whilst on some occasions they’ve even been used symbolically. Volcanoes aren’t always just there to look spectacular – delve into their deeper meanings, and you might never look at them in the…
Evolution, ecology and volcanoes
There are many questions one can ask that link evolution and ecology to volcanoes… Let’s start at a small scale in both space and time. Are plants and animals growing on and near active volcanoes different from those growing elsewhere? Yes, they are! Volcanic soils are rich in certain minerals, and plants like coffee grow…
LINGO: Where words are a matter of life and death
Learning a language is very much like playing a game: you need to be strategic, know how to identify what’s important and what’s not so essential. You must assess probability and take risks. Sometimes you must make do with little (your word bank, your range of structures) but you must also try to be accurate….
How to earn billions by giving something away for free
Few people can have escaped the massive success of Fortnite: Battle Royale. Launched in late 2017, the game had 250 million players by March 2019. In 2018 Fortnite made more money than any other game in history: $2.4 billion. While creativity and technology are essential to the success of a video game, economic decisions can…
Using Language to Build Characters and Worlds
Designing an immersive world is all about getting the details right. In a video game, the world consists of a number of elements, including the visual space, the characters that navigate it and the soundscape (music, sound effects and speech). It is in the finer details of these elements that the most immersive and fascinating…
Learn to programme
Turtle Academy is a simple-to-use website providing free lessons in basic computer programming. Using the LOGO language you can create amazing shapes and patterns in next to no time – give it a try and see what you can come up with!
A Tetris puzzle
If you fancy yourself as a Tetris whizz, try your hand at this puzzle set by St John’s Maths Tutor Dr David Seifert… One of the most successful video games of all time is Tetris. There are seven different Tetris pieces: the long piece, the square, the T-piece, two L-pieces and two Z-pieces. Each piece…
A good story is key
The most successful kind of plot for computer games – and indeed for all kinds of other stories, from international folk-tale, to medieval romance, to the great fantasy works of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, is the quest. The hero sets out from home on a quest to find something or with a mission to…
Make your own video game
Using the free website https://flowlab.io/ we want you to create your very own video game! It’s simple to use and doesn’t require any coding: simply drag and drop the game pieces into position and build your own virtual world. The tutorial is a great place to start.
The Game of Life
The Game of Life is one of the simplest video games ever to exist, and yet is one of the most addictive! It’s known as a zero player game as you simply choose your initial layout of black and white squares and then leave the game to evolve over time following a set of four…
What can we learn from video games?
What’s the point of a historical video game? What do you get from setting a battle in ancient Rome or on the battlefields of the Second World War, rather than in space, the far distant future, or an imaginary world? From a historian’s perspective, we might gain a number of new insights by playing through…
Why are video games addictive?
Psychologist Amy Orben discusses whether or not video games are addictive, and whether or not this should be considered a mental disorder.