Creative Tableaus: I've used this activity in previous years, but I found it was a little messy to organise and manage this time around. It could have been the rain, or my strained voice (I was presenting to 60 year 9s yesterday, for 5 hours), but it took the students a while to create their tableaus. It certainly warmed them up, at least...

VOX POP interviews: students were to choose a policy developed in last week's class, devise 5 or more questions they could ask their peers (in a VOX POP style) that would be open-ended and potentially get answers that support their chosen policy, and then film/audio record a peer in the VOX POP style as they answer the questions.

This activity took a little while to get started, but once the students understood their task they dove right into it. We let them film or record audio for this activity, and they worked away at this for the majority of the session, playing with filming and asking the questions. We did a review session afterwards, and explored why the students weren't always receiving the answers they had hoped for, whether it was due to the person the were asking, or the way they asked it. This will be useful info for them when developing other aspects of their political marketing campaign.

The secret history of “their drawings”. Borrowing an example from the creative reflection journal, I ran the students through a similar activity that brought back their drawings from last session. I wanted this activity to get them thinking about backstories, assumptions and personas of people or characters, but we had a busy session otherwise, so we decided to let them free flow with this reflection, mostly just chatting away about wildly creative and quirky backstories for the characters they drew.

This session was a little off the books, trying the students out with a bit of media work that could tie in with their overarching project. Very few of them had heard of VOX POP filming before, so there was a learning curve to that, but it was valuable to give them a unique cross-curricular task, and they seemed to enjoy the opportunity to mess around with the camera app on the ipads and film each other. The class discussion afterwards was valuable, as many of the students began realising how hard it is to design questions that actually get you the answer you want.

The students seemed to enjoy the more autonomous structure of the main activity. After they had been setup with the task and their groups they went right ahead with it all, experimenting with the questions they had devised, and filming the other group answering said questions. There was plenty of discussion around which policies worked better than others, during interviews and outside.

While the majority of students enjoy high energy activities, some of them seemed a bit outcast during this session - unwilling to be as outgoing with this activity as their peers. This was especially evident during the warmup activity. Future sessions will return to more diverse activity options.

With half the term left, we will also properly dive into preparing for the mock election. We have loosely planned out the next 5 sessions in the following order; posters, speeches, video content, mock election, counting up and review.

Sample political advertising posters (just pictures on the google slides, most likely), so the students have some references to work from. Will work out more as we go throughout the week.

Questions and interviews were saved to the class ipads, so these can be extracted and collated for showcases later on.