In this blogpost, MEP Project Manager Yasmin Lambert talks about the Year 10 Intensive Study event which took place in June 2022. To read more about the project and see some of the tourism campaigns, click here.
Intensive Study is an integral part of the Mandarin Excellence Programme (MEP) for every year group. For Year 10 students, that takes the form of the Tourism Project, a 4-day blended learning event where students get to design and create their own marketing campaign in Mandarin to advertise their local area to Chinese tourists. In 2022 this took place between Monday 6th – Thursday 16th June. Students spent 3 days in school completing their campaigns, and then the final day was spent at a university taking part in fun and insightful activities with MEP students from other schools.
To help them with their campaigns, students followed an online course built by the UCL IOE MEP team. The campaigns consist of 3 phases, and there is a key piece of work to be completed in each phase:
- Picking the destination to advertise and making a poster with a catchy slogan;
- Deciding which demographic to target and putting together a fun day-trip itinerary that will appeal to that audience;
- Learning authentic language for structuring a marketing video, then filming and editing a short multi-media video advertisement.
Working together in small groups with their classmates, students developed their 3-part campaign with ongoing feedback from their teacher and UCL IOE PGCE Mandarin students who supported the students with their work. Once finished, the final videos were sent to the universities who were hosting MEP students for the final day of the event.
In total, there were 11 universities who hosted students as part of the MEP Year 10 event: Newcastle University, Lancaster University, University of Sheffield, University of Warwick, University of Nottingham, Oxford Brookes University, University of Westminster, SOAS, Queen Mary University London, University of Kent and University of Southampton.
The MEP team worked with the 11 hosts to plan a schedule for the day, which was slightly different at each university but looked roughly like this:
- Welcome and introductions;
- Morning activities such as: campus tours, samples lectures and Q+A discussions with university staff and undergraduate students;
- Lunch on campus and chance to mingle with students from other schools;
- An afternoon session watching each other’s video advertisements, peer-reviewing the work of other students and then voting to pick a winner.
Visiting a university was a good opportunity for students from different MEP schools to interact and talk to each other about their experiences of being on the programme. The day at a university also helped students to envisage where their Mandarin learning journey could one day lead to, providing students with an insight into daily life on campus for undergraduate students. From feedback we have received from students and teachers alike, the university day seemed to be an enjoyable and very informative experience. Thank you again to our 11 host universities who helped support this event!
To read more about the project and see some of the tourism campaigns, click here.
The MEP Year 10 Intensive Study Tourism Project will take place again in June 2023. Make sure to come back to our website again in late summer to read about how it went.
