Collar & Tie Limited Public Funding

COVID-19 has closed schools across the UK and internationally, meaning millions of children are now being educated at home, to varying degrees of success. Some subjects are more easily taught through digital platforms. Most online learning tools are instructional, using the web as a means of educational transmission. Often, practical subjects are disadavantgaed by these tools. Subjects like the arts, PE and CDT require students to be practical. Even subjects like Geography, History, RE and English require project based learning, often in groups. Most websites cannot help with this. Prospero is a powerful Online Distance Learning created by theatre company C&T and it directly addresses exactly these practical needs. Prospero brings together creativity, practical work and digital technologies to enhance learning. It enables the building of interactive lessons, called Smartscripts. These can be populated with practical tasks, dilemmas, conflicts and challenges designed to provoke students into taking part in these digitally enabled lessons. This project extends what Prospero can already do, by extending the system's toolkit for teachers and making it available to students. This will give the learner the chance to build their own interactive portfolios of practical work and collaborate with their classmates, even if they are separated by distance. Our objectives are: \* Make changes so students can easily access the appropriate functions and tools in Prospero. \* Add tools so teachers can supervise, moderate and evaluate their students' work \* Build a new evaluation module, so Prospero can collect, report and evaluate data. \* Add message board functions to students can collaborate on practical work easily. \* Create a training module, so teachers and students can get to work easily in Prospero. \* Finally, test the whole system with teachers from all subjects so we know it works and is relevant. This will make Prospero more user friendly, intuitive to use and responsive to the creativity of students. As young people become more immersed in video games and notions of 'gamifaction' this project will turn this enthusiasm to education's advantage. Prospero will be able to make engaging, child friendly lessons and workshops wherever students are learning. Prospero will become to practical learning what Minecraft is to Lego. Even the most challenging subjects and issues will become accessible in new and relevant ways. Finally we will evaluate what we have learned and bring our new technology to schools in the UK and across the world. The extension activities will allow us to achieve three further things: 1. Undertake extensive and large-scale beta testing with cohorts of students across a cross section of schools. This will enable us to assess the robustness of the platform when large numbers of users are active on the site simultaneously and to track functionality with regard to user data analysis, evaluation and real-time collaboration. 2. Based on this testing, make revisions to our business and exploitation plan to accurately reflect data usage and how this impacts costs and pricing. 3. Undertake similar testing in partner schools in New York City, through a partnership with NYC Department of Education. This will enable us to. modify our offer to reflect the needs of the American market, where Prospero already has a small market presence.