We are delighted to announce that, as a result of our collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MiT), the British International School Shanghai is to open two state of the art centres for STEAM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths).

The primary school centre will be called ‘The Da Vinci Centre’ and will be a wonderful space for creative thinking, shown publicly here for the first time. Featuring a robotics lab, Lego lab, collaborative learning and presentation space, animation and graphics facilities, a science lab, maker-space and a green screen TV studio, the Da Vinci Centre will be the landmark provision for primary school creative thinking in Shanghai.

Providing opportunity for students to not only be “problem solvers”, but also, perhaps more crucially in the 21st century, “problem finders”, the Da Vinci Centre at BISS will allow students to collaborate, form hypotheses, test ideas, create prototypes, investigate theories and produce solutions to real world problems through a wide range of projects and areas of learning.

This fantastic new facility, and the exciting teaching and learning that supports it, is the natural evolution of our school’s great tradition of combining the very best in academic excellence with new and exciting learning opportunities for all our students.

See the full gallery of images on our website ...

The secondary centre will be a breath-taking addition to the secondary building, as the architects’ renderings show here. On the first floor, there will be a robotics lab, microelectronic design space, a fabrication lab or ‘FabLab’, a maker-space and a wonderful collaborative learning space which will be redolent of the great creative design hubs that our entrepreneurial students may work at, such as Google or Apple design spaces. On the second floor, there will be a fantastic media studio and fully operational TV studio with control gantry, alongside a boutique cinema for showing and celebrating student creativity at its finest.

In recognition of the importance of women engineers and creatives, the name for the secondary centre is currently being debated by students and will adopt the name of a female scientist, engineer or polymath, just as Da Vinci has inspired so many for so long.

These two new centres represent a very significant investment by Nord Anglia Education in providing the very finest facilities for British International School Shanghai students, reinforcing our position as the premium international school in Shanghai. Having been 9 months in the planning, we are very excited to be able to share these first architects’ images with you and look forward to sharing further details with you over the coming weeks about our progress towards opening these two peerless facilities for innovation, thinking and creativity.

Dr Neil Hopkin FRSA, Principal

Read the article on our website ...