Research School Network: Research Co-Production: An Exciting Opportunity for a Bradford Secondary School How Bradford secondary schools can join in research co-production

John Pickavance, post-graduate researcher at the University of Leeds and Bradford Institute of Health Research, is looking for a Bradford secondary school to take part in an exciting project.

Since 2012, we at Born in Bradford have assessed approximately 10,000 pupils with a range of cognitive tasks. These assessments have been linked to health and education data to better understand child and adolescent development, identify barriers to learning, and develop scalable interventions that may improve educational outcomes. We know much about primary age pupils, but we need to learn more about secondary.

Interceptive timing

Our current research is looking at understanding how children and teenager’s ability to hit moving targets (e.g. catching a ball) develops through adolescence. Research suggests it recruits neural processes that are linked with teenagers’ attainment in mathematics.

In order to gather further data, we have developed an innovative new platform which allows us to collect data as students play a browser based video game, fruit bat splat. To generate the data we need, we are looking for a school to ask all of their students to play a 20 – 30 minute session of this game. You can play a demo of the game here – you will need to use the secret key ​‘notryan’.

Students as researchers

In addition to contributing to research that can improve lives, we will be offering two online sessions in parallel to selected 14 – 16-year-olds. The first session, prior to data collection, will consist of an introduction to scientific research and hypothesis testing. Students will consider how familiar technologies (e.g. mobile phone apps and online games) are used to collect data and what kinds of questions could be answered with it. After a brief introduction to BiB research, they will be invited to draft their own questions about the school community and think about what measures they would need to take. Subsequently, we would screen suggestions for their suitability and include selected measures in our game.

Once data has been collected, the second session will be a hands-on workshop that introduces students to basic data science techniques. Guided by our research team, students will use the statistical programming language R to explore their data, producing visualisations that may help them in answering the original research questions.

Through our approach of online co-production, we hope to engage the school community with STEM in a way that is fun and minimally disruptive. Moreover, we can offer all important first-hand experience to those students who may wish to pursue STEM careers, during a time in which such opportunities are absent. Finally, we hope that by consulting members of the school on measures to include, the findings will be meaningful and of great value to staff and students alike, perhaps even forming the basis of future initiatives driven by senior management or the student body.

What will be involved?

• A member of staff responsible for distributing and recording anonymized access tokens
• A one hour research consultation (online) with one teacher and a select class of no more than thirty 14 – 18 year olds
• Years 7−11(+12−13 if applicable) complete the game (online) at the start of a class with access to a computer (no more than 30 minutes)
• A two hour statistics workshop (online) for select students to explore the data using the freely available R statistical programming language
• The consultation and statistics workshop will be delivered by a member of our research team
  

If this sounds like something your school would be interested in then please send me an email at psjpp@​leeds.​ac.​uk. Likewise, if you simply would like to learn more about our plans then please don’t hesitate to contact me.