15 May 2006

QPA celebrates "web oscar" for virtual quarry

The Quarry Products Association's flagship educational website, the Virtual Quarry has won a major prize in the 2006 Communicators in Business Awards held in Bournemouth last Friday. The site, which was only launched in January this year, picked up the "Most Imaginative Design" award, beating off stiff competition from leading players such as BT and international law firm Allen & Overy.

Following securing Aggregates Levy Sustainability Funding through MIST in autumn 2004, the QPA brought together a steering group from across the industry and education to try and raise the profile of the quarrying industry through helping young people to make the link between their local quarry and the built environment. The resulting Virtual Quarry site features a fully interactive 3D tour of a hard rock quarry, with specially created animated characters to explain the processes involved in extracting rock from the ground, crushing and screening to produce aggregates and transporting the products to where they are needed. The virtual tour also includes background on the planning process, on archaeology and a look at how quarries are restored when extraction is finished.

Alongside this high-tech virtual tour, the site also features films and animations covering interesting elements of the industry, a game that helps to highlight the importance of careful environmental management, a "virtual microscope" allowing children to examine rocks in more detail and news of a wide range of industry-related days out for children with their class or family.

To ensure the site is as relevant and useful as possible for young people, the QPA worked with a team of teachers to develop 20 teaching units inspired by the industry that teachers can download for free use in the classroom. Drawing on features of the Virtual Quarry tour as well as encouraging schools to arrange a visit to their local quarry, the units feed directly into the national curriculum to make them easy to adopt.

Since its launch at the BETT teaching technology show in London in January, the site has already received nearly 20,000 visits, a phenomenal success for such a new teaching resource. Developed with the technical expertise of Wolverhampton-based CPR Works and the support of Daybreak Communications, the QPA's site is set to help raise the profile of this vital industry with young people.

Commenting on the success for the QPA, the Project's Director Elizabeth Clements said: "this has been a truly exciting project to be involved with and has seen the association work in a new direction with young people. This award is a testament to the hard work of a huge number of people involved in this project from the industry, from education and from the world of web design. Not only have we created a unique and powerful learning resource that is relevant to today's young audiences, but we have also been recognised as the authors of a site that is at the forefront of modern web design."

ENDS

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