Virtual Vikings and More – Extending Educational Reach & Access

‘Virtual Vikings and More’ is a programme of highly interactive, educational experiences, which brings the excitement of physically engaging with the past to a digital world. The project was created by York Archaeological Trust, who own and manage the JORVIK Viking Centre.

It is funded through National Lottery Project Grants, our open access programme which is supporting thousands of individual artists, community and cultural organisations to make work and have the time to think, plan and test new ideas during Covid-19.

About the project

We have reacted to the challenges caused by Covid-19 by creating a concept for a new virtual engagement programme. It offers unique, online shared experiences for young people based at home and in classrooms across the country.

Built on our experience-led museum presentation at JORVIK Viking Centre, ‘Virtual Vikings and More’ aims to deliver fully accessible and, importantly, interactive sessions to schools and homes across the UK. 

We want to support teachers and parents by delivering cross-curricular sessions in entertaining and educationally reputable ways; giving young people innovative and inspiring opportunities to engage directly with Vikings, medieval citizens, Romans and archaeologists, even when unable to physically visit our museums.

Through this project we want to pioneer new digital museum engagement, so that we can share what we learn and help others benefit during a time when changing how people access our culture and heritage is essential.

Working during the pandemic

Covid-19 has highlighted the need to do things differently in the cultural industries. This is mirrored in the education sector where shared experiences & stimulating learning experiences are now less readily available. Already, opportunities for children to experience creativity and culture are unequal due to social & financial deprivation. 

By replicating these performances and conversations virtually, whilst delivering excellent educational outcomes, we will bring the JORVIK experience into schools and homes and elevate children’s enjoyment of learning.

Likewise, obstacles for teachers using museums as an extension to classroom learning include; increased workload, cost, heightened stress and managing behaviour. If we can reduce these barriers by developing new virtual ways of using museums, then we can maximise the benefits and impact for these children and help mitigate this inequality.

We know that children are inspired by JORVIK, particularly their live encounters with Vikings. By replicating these performances and conversations virtually, whilst delivering excellent educational outcomes, we will bring the JORVIK experience into schools and homes and elevate children’s enjoyment of learning.

Our advice to other organisations working in this new environment would be: get creative with what you already have, use your resources, your people and their ideas to create something new and exciting at a time where people, including those that work for you, need to be inspired and excited. 

Make this difficult period a time of opportunity, to try something that moves your organisation forwards. People still need culture and heritage and will welcome the chance to enjoy it in whatever form it takes. 

The audience

We want to provide young people with more opportunities to enjoy culture and heritage, challenging social isolation, barriers to access, and inequality of wealth and opportunity. 

Up until now, our school’s offer has predominantly served a local and regional audience. Our new digital offer aims to extend coverage to a national and even international audience and ensure that young people, wherever they are based, can take advantage of our unique learning offers. 

The bespoke nature of this project means we can be mindful of specific access requirements, so that each session can be tailored to individual requirements, so no-one is excluded. 

We also want to use this project to offer opportunities for our staff and volunteer teams to engage with technical experts to develop exciting and innovative ways of delivering our ideas. To build skills, infrastructure and networks outside our own.

We want the young people we work with to experience something they haven’t previously and grow their love of learning. Our new sessions (from the security of their own classrooms or homes) aim to develop confidence through interaction, which could be unpredictable, humorous and thought provoking – including hot-seating a Viking or archaeologist or questioning a barber surgeon about life and death in medieval England and drawing comparisons with challenges today.

The future

We’re developing new sessions within our 2021 programme that will enable children to explore live archaeological sites to experience the thrill of discovery first-hand.

We hope that the children we work with will be able to take part in something completely different to excite their imaginations and perhaps even start to germinate new longer-term interests in something they may never have thought of previously. Exciting them – excites us!

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