What we do

Student Activity

The Transition Year Programme: This involves Transition Year students from schools around Dublin spending 4 days in Bridge21. During this time they learn how to work in teams, gain new technology skills and get a taste of life in Trinity. Many students are invited to return for advanced programmes covering everything from language learning to physics, and art to computer programming. Additions to our suite of advanced workshops this year included Development Education, run in conjunction with the NGO GOAL, Science, run with the help of Science Gallery and Invent Week, an advanced computer science workshop. Up to 250 students take part (some for multiple workshops) each year. The gender breakdown is usually around 50/50 and most students come from schools with disadvantage status or who are otherwise associated with the Trinity Access Programmes.

Introduction to Bridge21: These workshops are provided to students from schools which are attempting to move towards a 21^st century model of teaching learning (using the Bridge21 model) for delivering mainstream curriculum teaching. 1 or 2 day student workshops provide an introduction to the Bridge21 learning model. The students spend one day here on campus and gain experience working as part of a team and completing a creative, technical project. Multimedia work is often involved on these days. These workshops are available to students from a wide variety of schools both in Dublin and around the country.

Computer Science Transition Year Workshops: A dedicated Computer Science programme for TY students. It follows the same 4 day format as the Core programme with team work and a project-based approach to learning central.  Topics range from Computational Thinking through programming with Scratch and Python to hacking and hardware projects with games consoles and the Raspberry Pi. Over 100 students take part in this programme each year.

CodePlus: This initiative, supported by ICS Skills, is aimed at addressing the lack of female participation in Computer Science. We created a specialised version of the Computer Science Transition Year workshops and it is open to girls from secondary schools around Dublin. 300 girls take part in CodePlus each year.

Primary School Programme: Each year, 250 students from 10 disadvantaged schools spend one day on campus with Bridge21. The day involves movie-making, team work and getting to see a lot Trinity College. An interesting feature of the workshops is that we invite Transition Year students who took part in the core programme to come back and act as teachers (mentors) to the Primary school children.

Teacher Support/CPD

To achieve the Brideg21 goal of helping to transform Irish secondary school education collaboration with teachers is essential. To this end we offer a suite of teacher professional development activities.

Teacher Workshops in Bridge21 Schools: We work with our network of partner schools with a view to assisting them to move towards using our model of 21^st century teaching and learning to deliver the mainstream curriculum.  We provide teacher workshops to assist in this process.

Professional Masters in Education: Each year, all Trinity PME students receive their core ICT module in Bridge21 as part of their course work. This gives them an immersive experience, much like the students get, and first hand experience of the Bridge21 model in action.

Trinity Access 21 (TA21)

This is a flagship outreach project from Trinity which deepens the existing collaboration between Bridge21 and the Trinity Access Programmes (TAP) and also increases the involvement of both the School of Education and School of Computer Science & Statistics. The project is funded by Google and 11 DEIS secondary schools are involved.  There are a number of strands to it as outlined below.

STEM Postgraduate Certificate: A level 9 postgraduate certificate runs out of the School of Education in order to formally train existing teachers in the Bridge21 methodology as it applies to STEM/CS education and educational disadvantage. teachers will complete the CERT in the current academic year and have the option to progress onto the existing M.Ed. (School of Education) or M.Sc. (Technology & Learning) (School of Computer Science & Statistics).

CS Workshops: We have made the CS modules from the certificate available, on a non-accredited basis, to teachers outside the Bridge21/TA21 networks. Interested teachers can find out more here

(* The Cert and non accredited workshops include much of the the content teachers need to teach the NCCA Digital Media and Coding short courses. *)

CFES: This is suite of offerings (from an American NGO – College For Every Student) in the area of changing school culture around progression to 3^rd level from disadvantaged schools. It involves raising awareness of what is needed to progress to 3^rd level; developing leadership skills in students though community service projects and a mentoring programme. A large cohort from the 11 schools (1,200 students in total) have been identified for longitudinal tracking.

Research Output

The increasing scale of Bridge21 is allowing us to increase our evidence base and research output. We currently have two full-time and several part-time PhD candidates doing research directly related to the programme. A listing of our research output to date is available here.

What the students say….