STEAMing ahead at Dulwich College Shanghai Puxi

Nov 7, 2022

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This week marks our College STEAM Week, with students from Year 2 all the way to Year 10 taking part in a variety of activities from Monday 31 October through to Wednesday 2 November.

STEAM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Maths, is an integral part of our SE21 framework, and we are lucky to have access both to a wide body of talented staff as well as to external partners, all of whom have come together to bring engagement, excitement, and academic rigor to our STEAM Week events.

To begin the week, on Monday Senior School students took part in workshops that were linked to our College values. Students selected two different workshops with the goal of gaining hands-on experiences in a variety of areas linked to STEAM that they either would not usually experience, or may not have realised have links to STEAM in the first place.

As a way of encouraging students to Aim High Together, we partnered with Ubisoft Shanghai and Girls Make Games to bring two externally facilitated workshops to our Monday sessions.

To begin the day, Ubisoft programmer, Francois Remacle, took students through the video game development process including giving them hands-on experience in character modification, in-game lighting rigging, and the art of problem-solving within a game design engine. Students had the chance to learn the basics of Unity and Blender, both industry-standard tools. This workshop, co-designed by Dulwich College Shanghai Puxi and Ubisoft, gave students the chance to see the wide variety of skills and opportunities available in the video game industry, from art design to programming and more.

The second of our Aim High Together workshops was designed by Girls Make Games, a non-profit organisation in the USA that runs a series of summer camps, workshops and game jams targeted at middle school-aged girls to inspire the next generation of designers, creators, and engineers. The Girls Make Games workshop was the first step in a year-long partnership with the organisation. In this workshop, participants learned how a group of girls all aged around 14 years old designed a prototype of a platformer game, presented it in front of industry judges from companies such as Nintendo, Playstation, and Zynga, and then went on to raise over $40,000 to have their game professionally produced and released. They even had the chance to play it themselves!

Alongside the rest of the EiM family, we hope that Monday’s workshops, as well as the rest of STEAM week will inspire all students to think creatively and solve real-world challenges with the help of STEAM, and look forward to sharing photos and STEAM creations at the end of the week!

Below is a look at our STEAM Week activities.

Aim High Together
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