Our TES award-winning Da Vinci programme kicked off last week for our Year 10 students.

The Da Vinci Programme at NHEHS encourages girls to take a cross-curricular approach to learning. Focusing on current events and learning new skills through debate and collaboration, the sessions require no prior knowledge of a particular subject, but an open and inquiring mind is a must-have!  Girls from Year 10 are given a choice of two topics to participate in. Previous years have included sessions ranging from Secrets of the Teenage Brain, Exploring Modern Masculinities, How to be the World’s Most Powerful Super Villain, Women’s Sport: Sexism, Stereotypes & Missed Opportunities to The Chemical Origin of Life and The Morality of Cultural Appropriation.

For week one, students attended sessions on either Life in the GDR or Political Utopia: a campaign simulation.

Political Utopia aimed to challenge the pupils’ thinking about what they perceive to be an ideal political situation and to question whether a ‘political utopia’ could be achieved. They were given the task of creating their own political party and campaign which they then had to present to the rest of the group who were able to scrutinise and question how this would improve our current political situation.

The next session takes place on December 7th when we will be discussing Mean Girls – is it an average film? A study of mean stereotypes in films, and the most important mathematical means.

Next term we will be delving into the following topics and more:

History of Art: Who is Ai-Da? Who is DALL-E? Has AI and VR changed the art world for the better?
PSW: The Anatomy of a Joke
Psychology: Pet’s – what’s that all about? A historical, psychological and biological perspective
Physics: The Road to being Well Tempered
Maths: The Mathematics of card tricks
Biology: How epidemics have shaped the world.
History: Rewriting History
Economics: Why does anyone do anything? An Economic study of criminal behaviour