Emily Carvin at the Museum of Antiquities at Newcastle University with her drawing of Hercules.
Education projects that began in the North-East are now bringing the region's Roman past to national attention.
The Reticulum and Flavius projects at Newcastle University's Museum of Antiquities have been shortlisted for the 2004 Gulbenkian Prize for Museum of the Year and will find out in two weeks time if they have won.
The projects see museum staff teaching youngsters from Northumberland about the Romans using IT and artifacts from the museum's collection.
But now schools around the country are contacting the museum to take up the materials for use with their children.
Yesterday, judges in the £100,000 Gulbenkian competition - including the BBC's arts correspondent Rosie Millard and fellow broadcaster Joan Bakewell - made their last visit to the museum before a final decision is made.
They saw children from Swarland First School, in Northumberland, working with museum staff to design a head for a headless Roman statue of Hercules - a project that is typical of Reticulum's innovative approach to engaging children.
Swarland headteacher Janet Dyson said: "It's been a fantastic project for the children.
"They've come into a small museum and the displays have been made really interesting to them.
"Staff from the museum have also come into school and done things like letting the children touch Roman pottery. The culture of museums is often `don't touch' so this is really refreshing and brings things to life.
"Museums can be a very dry experience that are very adult orientated.
"This is much more children-led and let's the kids feel that they're part of the whole thing."
Jo Catling, education officer at the museum, said: "We've always gone into schools rather than just have them come to us.
"It's a long-term thing and it allows us to develop a relationship with the schools.
"We try to adapt things to each school's geographical location so we can give the children a sense of their own identity in the region's past. When we worked with Byrness First School we went to the fort at High Rochester and that worked well.
"Most museums do education projects in the museums but we want to take our work out into the communities and make it live."
Reticulum started in 2000 as a joint venture between the Museum of Antiquities and the first schools in the Blyth Valley to explore the use of IT in teaching History, particularly the history of the Romans in Northumberland.
The Flavius project was started after the foot-and-mouth outbreak to take the collection into schools in rural Northumberland.
A teaching pack developed to go with the two projects has been made available to schools in Northumberland, and now schools from other parts of the country are also taking up the packs.
The project explores life in the north of England before, during and after the Roman occupation, looking at native settlement sites as well as Hadrian's Wall and the Roman forts.
Teachers who have been involved in the project have reported using the methodology to teach other periods of history with excellent results.
The project is one of four finalists in the Gulbenkian Prize, which will be announced on May 11 in a ceremony at the Royal Academy, in London.
A project at the Segedunum Roman Fort, in Wallsend, was on the prize's original shortlist of 13, but did not made it into the final.
Northumberland