Project Launch

On Tuesday 23rd October 2012, Mr Fawcett launched the 'GCSE PE Cycling Project'.  He showed us a video outlining the perception of cycling world wide and the general attitudes towards the sport and what all of our class were going to be participating in throughout the project.  The video was very good and got us all interested in the project.  To see the video click here.

Next, he showed us a timetable of key dates and this gave us an idea of what we would be doing over the coming weeks.  This timetable included weekly cycling lessons within school with British Cycling.  The practical lessons would be taken by Dave Jowett who is a British Cycling South Region Coach.  After we had been professionally trained on the bikes, we would go and visit Calshot Velodrome to have a seminar from Mark Adams who is the Regional Development Manager.  Mark would give a talk on cycling and relate all of our GCSE PE topics to the sport.  During this trip we would also get to ride on track race bikes around the velodrome in a 90 minute session.  Also on the timetable was a chance for us to have a Skype Q&A session with Dave Harmon (a Eurosport commentator) to learn more about how the topics we are covering link to cycling.  Our theory lessons would be researching many different aspects of British Cycling and its components and using these as rich examples for the GCSE PE theory content. At the end of all this, we will be producing a presentation and an article about how we can give cycling more media coverage.  The topics we will be researching have very strong arguments to support this question and should help us develop our GCSE PE knowledge further.  All of this was a very exciting prospect for our class.  These presentations will be shown at an exhibition evening which will include members of the local press, PE teachers, parents, British Cycling representatives and hopefully a Team GB cyclist.

From seeing the timetable and watching the video, this was a really exciting prospect for the class and the reactions were fantastic as very few had experienced track cycling before with some students having little experience with a bike at all!

Although the practical of this project stood out and would be fantastic, we were also given the opportunity to learn the theory of our course through examples from British cycling which will help contribute to our final exam for our PE GCSE.  We put ourselves into the pairs that we would do our presentations in.  We were given cycling articles to read over half term so that we could study it and learn more about the project.  There were also a number of cycling videos that Sir either tweeted out or uploaded to Edmodo/Google Drive which we watched to get a deeper understanding of the sport, and a base of examples to use already.

What an experience it will be!