School Visits to China Among Signs Of Changing Educational Landscape

School visits to China are the perfect representation of the school system’s changing attitude towards study trips, as detailed by a recent report on BBC News’s website.

According to the piece in question, the days of school trips consisting of a quiet museum tour with little to no interactive learning opportunities are long gone. Nowadays, schools are investing more and more in said interaction, a trend that makes itself felt mostly through the plethora of new programmes available. These include activities such as high-wire assault courses, volunteering outings to developing or third world countries or school visits to China. These sorts of opportunities are nowadays thought to hold great didactic and educational value, and it comes as no surprise that they are being increasingly favoured by teachers and becoming staples of most school syllabi.

As a way to react to this new and expanded view of school outings, museums themselves have put measures into place to ensure a higher degree of interactivity in their displays. Storied institutions such as the Natural History Museum, in London, are making a conscious attempt to modernise themselves in order to be able to compete with the new and exciting alternatives schoolchildren have within their reach.

Recent efforts made by this particular museum to engage children with science and natural history have included an exhibit on volcanoes and earthquakes, where visitors can create their own rumbling tectonic plaques, and a geology exhibition where children can touch a number of rock samples in order to discover the differences between them.

Across the road from the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum presents its own reaction to school visits to China and other such activities through an interactive, virtual-reality treasure hunt. Younger visitors are encouraged to hunt for pearls in an augmented-reality setting; this game has so far been successful in attracting children to the museum and it is hoped the trend can continue.

It is clear, then, that the wealth of options available to students and teachers when it comes to school trips is changing the entire educational landscape irrevocably.

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