RKK’S Convivial Conclave

Posted: 02 December 2020

Overview

The Conclave, hosted by Rajmata Krishna Kumari Girls’ Public School was a purely student-oriented event. The school empowered its student community to plan, organised and execute a variety of activities to share with other schools throughout this collaboration. The Conclave comprised of a variety of interactive sessions for students aged 13 to 16. Students from Dhirubai Ambani International School, Birla Public School, Sunbeam School, Sunbeam School, Vidya Devi Jindal School, Pathways World School, Mayo College Girls’ School, Assam Valley School joined inquisitive and passionate discussions on various subjects ranging from Time travel to the Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The various activities helped the students to think beyond the “normal”. Overall, it was a student empowering and team building event and enabled students to venture through their different potentials.

Planning

Firstly, the student organisers came up with a three day action plan, the collaboration proposal was then uploaded on to the RS website where we invited schools within the network to join us. We were delighted to have nine schools sign up. The student organisers decided to extended the three day action plan into five days due to overwhelming response from the participating schools. They contemplated and discussed about the activities to be conducted and a proper invitation was provided to the interested schools in the form of Google Forms.

The participating schools were provided eight days to register their responses. The invitation consisted of a section where the students were allowed to choose the activities that they found captivating according to their individualistic interests. On receiving the confirmation from the students, emails were sent along with the detailed guidelines of the activities chosen by them. A proper personalised schedule was created and sent to each participating student.

There were in total seven activities, each were coordinated by three students from the organising committee. The organisers of each event connected with the students personally via emails to exchange the required information for the activities. All the activities were conducted on the Google Meet Platform and the link for participation was sent to the students 24 hours prior to the event.

Details

There were in total 7 activities planned for which were as follows –

1) PowerPoint Karaoke – This was an in the moment activity where the participants were asked to give a presentation from a slide deck that they had never seen before. Each participant had to submit a PowerPoint Presentation on an unusual and unique topic. The presentations were shuffled and randomly allotted to the students to ensured that no student receives his/her own presentation. This activity tested the presenter’s skills for acting extemporarily to unexpected things. It got the students laughing and they all were inquisitive to know what will happen next.

2) Word Charades – Participants were provided with two words, 5 minutes prior to the competition. Thereafter, they had to describe and give hints for those particular words in a maximum of two phrases. Each of them was given 30 seconds to describe their words. The other students who were not describing were asked to guess the words as quickly as possible. The participants were then asked to choose a Hindi word of their choice and were asked to describe it in Hindi.

3) Mystery in History – A mysterious or unsolved theory was provided to the participants who were divided into a team, a day prior to the activity. The students had to introduce the theory provided to them and they discussed and displayed their opinions as to why they find that particular mystery interesting and what they think are the barriers or reasons why it remains a mystery. They discussed on topics like Afterlife, Time travel, Existence of Aliens, etc. All students were able to ask questions to delve deeper into the topics being discussed.

4) School Exhibition – All participating schools had to present their school as a brand and had to advertise it to the audience using impressive and captivating taglines, presentations, incidents, etc. in a maximum of 3 minutes. At the end of the activity the students could vote as to which brand they liked the most (excluding their own school).

5) Quiz – A questionnaire presentation was created by the student organisers which was displayed in front of the participants. This questionnaire consisted of a wide range of categories and tasks. Students were asked to type their answer on the Google Meet Chat area. The first participant to text the answer was awarded a point which were tallied throughout the quiz for the overall winner.

6) The Talent Hunt – All the participants had to choose a particular activity that they were the most passionate about and had to present it in front of the audience for a duration of 3-5 minutes. The students sung songs, danced, played instruments, recited poetry, and displayed their artistic skills.

7) To binge or not to binge – For this event the participants had to decide a movie/series/book that they absolutely hate/like and had to convince the audience in terms of whether they should watch/read the particular movie/series/book or not and at the end of the event the audience was asked to vote either in favour or against watching / reading it. At the end of every participant’s presentation, the audience was asked to text in the Google Meet Chat box whether they would Binge or Not Binge the movie / series / book presented.

Challenges 

As it was a purely student-led initiative, there were some problems related to coordinating and scheduling the activities, considering the fact that the personal schedule of any student should not be affected by the event so that they could participate with a peaceful mind. Ensuring to communicate and provide information to all the students keeping in mind the fact that the information and instructions must be provided to them in a way that they could access them easily and feasibly without any confusion, was also a challenging task. The main challenge was to deal with the technical barriers like weak internet signals and to ensure that quality exposure is provided to all the participants.

Impact 

The students were able to explore their creative potentials with the help of these entertaining and enriching activities. They were encouraged to think beyond the mainstream thoughts prevailing in the society and they developed a contemporary and innovative approach for solving various problems. They got an opportunity to witness a plethora of thoughts and beliefs that helped them to accept and explore the diversity of thoughts prevailing around them and to expand their horizons. This opportunity also allowed students to socialise in this adverse time of social distancing

Long term outcomes 

The activities of the event enhanced the confidence and morale of the participants and helped them to realise that being different and having a different opinion is their strongest asset and that they should utilise it to without any hesitation in their life. The activities also helped them to develop an understanding as to how to deal with unexpected problems. Keeping in mind the importance of communication skills in today’s world, this activity definitely helped them to be better orators, thinkers, and listeners, and this would definitely add on to their Unique Selling Point’s (USP) in future. The students and the school would love to conduct such an activity again.

Advice

Author: Mrs Sapna Gupta, Round Square Representative, Rajmata Krishna Kumari Girls’ Public School

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