The Introduction to Chinese Traditional Culture I: Chinese Chess Initiated by QMES Volunteer Team
The Volunteer Team of Queen Mary Engineering School (QMES) is initiating a series of classes to introduce five aspects of Chinese traditional culture which contains Chinese Chess, Myths and Legends, Food, Calligraphy and Kung Fu, to QMES teachers in order to help them to understand China better and promote cultural communication. Meanwhile the confidence to Chinese culture will be also emphasized to the students themselves.
The Volunteer Team held the high enthusiasm in this programme and did a lot of specific preparation before the class, such as collecting the materials, studying on the content, editing the teaching plan and file, purchasing the teaching stuff and even producing the pre-task for the teachers, which is the same way as the one that the teachers give them.
In the Chinese Chess session on the 11th April, our English teachers - Alan, Faith and Agne from QMES were introduced to the history of Chinese Chess, the pattern of the chessboard and its rules by the Volunteer Team. And then Faith won a souvenir Chinese Chess set because she answered correctly the following quiz. At the end of the session, Alan won the “epic battle” against Faith, which last over 2 hours. Agne, who observed the whole battle, described “it is so tense and dead silence in the room”.
All the teachers consider the first session to be valuable and interesting and achieve a great success, and more impressed by the confidence the students showed when they spoke English smoothly. They are all looking forward to the next session.
