Beijing Spritivity
Workshops
Two Spritivity workshops were
run in the Beijing Children's Palace on July 7th 2007 by a
Spritivity team from ZenZone Media Arts Lab and the London
Multimedia Lab for Audiovisual Composition and
Communication. In each case, the workshop facilitator was
Yan Min, a teacher at the Beijing Children's Palace.
In the first (morning) pilot workshop,
ten Beijing children, aged 6 years, were introduced to
the picture books made at
Jubilee School (Mandarin Versions). They then made four picture books of
their own, using the sprites made at the Jubilee
School first workshop with the Sprite descriptions
translated into Mandarin), to show and tell stories
grounded in Chinese contexts.
The schedule for the morning
workshop was:
10.30 a.m: Prepation, distibution of materials (Sprites on
sticking paper, colour pens, paint brushes, paper)
10.40: Explanation about the workshop by Yan Min: Children
should create stories based on the sprites created by the children
at Jubilee school.
11.00: Children create a story and start painting
12.00 Children finish their paintings, tidy up and give
back the used materials.
Each child worked individually on creating a story and
making the picture book (unlike Jubilee school childen who
worked in groups of 6 to create each story and picture book
in ther second
workshop).
The Beijing children were very concentrated on this. Yan
Min answered the childen who had questions, and helped
children write down their stories. More help was needed by
the Beijing children (working individually) than had been
needed by the Jubilee children (working in groups).
Yan Min heping a Beijing child construct
a picture book story.
The short period of time available on the morning of July
7th meant that the versions of the picture books created at
the first workshop were still unfinished at 12 noon, but
the Beijing children decided that they would like the
Jubilee students to be able to use preliminary versions of
four of their picture books at the Jubilee
third
workshop.
View Picture book
1
View Picture book
2
View Picture book
3
View Picture book
4
In the second (afternoon) pilot workshop,
9 Beijing children aged 8 years, drew and described 31
Chinese Sprites that they thought Jubilee Primary School
students might enjoy using in making further picture books
(or other sprite-containing artefacts). The workshop
schedule was as follows:
3.30pm: Preparation, distirbution of materials (sprites on
sticking paper, colour pens, paint brushes, paper).
3.40: Explanation about the workshop by Yan Min: Children
should create three sprites each. Then they should each
create a story based on their sprites and on the sprites
from Jubilee school.
3.50: Children start creating their own sprites (wthout
basing them on photos they had taken, as did the Jubliee
children). Instead, they used their imagination to ground
their sprites in objects they could see within the
classroom view.
5.00 Children create stories, using their own sprites
together with sprites from Jubilee school.
5.30: Chilren present their stories to the others in the
class.
5.40 Yan Min shows the created sprites to the class as each
sprite's author explains it to the class.
5.55 Children tidy up and give back the used
materials
When the workshops were completed, the
picture books and sprites that the participants had created
were put into
the Spritivity Magic Bag for sending
to the students at Jubilee School in London, so that they
could read the books and use the sprites in enhancing their
own Spritivity picture books and in making new ones,
inspired by the Beijing students' ideas and
creations.
When the Spritivity Magic Bag arrived in England, the
Chinese students' descriptions of their sprites'
characertistics were translated into English by Ai Yu and
made into sheets of sprite descriptions (4 sprites per
page) with the Beijing sprites' characteristics in English
View Beijing Sprites
with descriptions in English
Beijing Sprite stickers were produced by
Patrick Humphreys, with multiple images of each sprite (in
3 sizes) on each page.
These were added to the contents of the
Sprivity Magic Bag, which was then ready for the
Jubilee School Third
Spritivity Workshop