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: Preparation and distribution 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 materials they employed.
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 materials they employed.
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