A group of Year 9 boys enjoyed a special preview of the Olympic Park site.
The 27-strong party – all successful entrants in a QE competition to design a logo for London 2010 – were taken around the site and were able to see how preparations for the Olympic Games are going.
“The boys were lucky enough to get a bus tour around the Olympic Park site. This is a real privilege as the waiting list for the tours is long and many people are unable to go,” said Geography Teacher Richard Smith.
The boys were able to see how the new stadia are progressing and how this area of London is being redeveloped. They learned how the development aims to be environmentally friendly: ‘green’ measures include planting thousands of trees across the park, the reintroduction of animal species and the inclusion of space for wild animal habitats.
“This was a fantastic opportunity for the students to go behind the scenes of a major redevelopment in London,” added Mr Smith. “It was great to see them enjoying the tour of the site, listening intently to facts and figures about the immense change happening there. Sensory fieldwork enabled the boys to gain a sense of place of the area in an unusual and stimulating way.”
The fieldwork involved comparing the developed site with unchanged land on the periphery. This included use of the ‘human camera’: the boys pair up, with one person acting as the camera and one as the photographer. The photographer steers the ‘camera’, whose eyes are closed, to an interesting view of the place they are working in. Once the photographer is happy with the shot, he squeezes the arm of the ‘camera’ and the boy opens his eyes for a brief moment. In this way, the boy acting as the camera is able to collect a number of snapshot images of the place to gain a different perspective than he might otherwise have had.