Everyone enjoyed the stadium tour looking behind the scenes at the various rooms whilst taking photos and making notes about stadium facts. Back in the study centre the students used their facts to compile a Stadium Tour postcard to take back to school. They used descriptive writing and inserted their photos.

Lynn led the stadium orienteering where groups solved maths and English clues to find letters that made a football themed anagram. The pupils showed good teamwork skills as well as mental maths skills.

The last part of the day saw the group participate in a football coaching session led by Football in the community (FiTC) coach Matt on the training pitch. The novelty of the inflatable pitch and goals were popular and the Barclaycard mentors joined in enthusiastically too.

They came up with open and closed questions to make sure they could gather enough information to compile a player profile with personal information/facts/statistics as well as in-depth background knowledge. Students were given free range as to what angle they wanted to take.

Three players from Northampton Town FC’s youth team, Lewis Hornby, Harry Mattock and Dean Snedker, deaf England footballer Claire Stancliffe and Phoenix basketball club coach Pete Bourgaine were in the hot seat and the sports leaders certainly kept them busy with a huge range of questions. Good note taking and speaking and listening skills are essential when conducting and interview.

Our leaders were very professional and put their interviewees at ease and got them talking. After the interviews, they worked in groups to compile profiles, some examples can be seen here. (Click on to enlarge and read.) They had the choice as to write a factual profile or report-style. The group fedback on how they found the experience, what went well and what could be improved for next time. A big thanks to our guests for being such interesting and friendly interviewees.

School Sports Manager for East Northants Charlotte Sayers then briefed the group on their upcoming school games role as coaches, officials, reporters and photographers in June and July.

After researching ideas on the internet, he had to design the launcher to make sure the ‘rockets’ would launch safely. Then it was just a case of testing of it, quite a few times, and making adjustments as necessary.

A diagram of the catapult design was given along with already cut pieces of wood, a length of elastic and plastacine to make the projectiles. Once built it had to be tested to see whether it followed the correct arc. In the meantime other members of the team had to build the castle out of free standing polystyrene bricks, make the projectiles, a flag and add three plastacine figures.

Once ready we threw a dice to see who would launch first. In turns they then launched their projectiles toward the other tables castle. Points were given for accuracy and hitting any figures. The overall winner was KKJ castle with ‘The death machine’ catapult.

Skills learnt were: teamwork, strategy, design, turn taking, communication and reflection

Ash was on hand to guide them through the process of taking various shots from different camera angles but they decided on how the film was going to look. Jerome, our mentor assisted in setting the boys up with throw ins etc.

Next week they will be editing their film.