校园精英汇聚上海长宁国际学校，共“谋”未来 - 2016年04月01日

ON March 4, 250 young passionate masterminds from international schools, along with 50 GIN advisors and chaperones arrived at the Shanghai Community International School's Hongqiao campus, ready to change the world. Their destination was the 2016 “EnGINineering Our Future” Global Issues Network Conference. The purpose of this year's GIN conference was to connect middle schoolers from all over Asia, to pass on knowledge through workshops and activities where students could socialize and share information, so that they can create a platform to work together towards engineering a future we are all proud of.
This year's participants had been eagerly working on projects in their own schools, all targeting different global issues. “Peer-to-Peer” workshops were held on the first day, where students presented projects to each other. Notes and pictures were taken, a tremendous amount of questions were asked, and most importantly, students educated each other about problems happening today, and shared their solutions to these problems.
Motivational keynote speakers from various nations were invited, and challenged both the students and GIN teachers to go beyond the obvious, to be innovative, and to help each other create a better world for our future. Speakers were Peggy Liu, Bunny Yan, Maciej Dudek, and Rob Han. These are all inspirational leaders in today's society, all working towards the same goal; a sustainable world. They all talked about what they are doing for people and the environment, with the purpose of encouraging students to join them in the fight for a better world.
To teach students how they can actually use their newly gained skills in the real world, the conference highlighted the weekend with five hours of hands-on, “enGINeering” workshops, some in which students up-cycled everyday items that are usually thrown away, giving them a new purpose. Other students worked on hanging aquaponic gardens, bamboo construction, designing small scale energy efficient homes, and designing creative “viral” water awareness campaigns. Through these workshops, students experienced and understood the innovative design process — a process used by inventors and innovators, startups and kick starters around the world.
As a part of the conference's zero waste theme, green accommodation was offered. Students and their chaperones slept in classrooms on campus, ate, showered, and networked in one location, reducing transportation emissions to and from the event. Also, fun activities such as a Swap Shop, Tee4Tee, Sustainability Fair, and the energized social networking events were offered over the weekend. Throughout the social networking event, participants were asked to share their story as to why they became interested and passionate about global issues. It is their “story” that students realized was one of their most powerful tools to successfully motivate people into action.
Putting together such a huge conference was a lot of work and took seven months of planning, but was all worth it in the end. Having 300 people together from different parts of the world, with the same passion for global issues was one of the greatest highlights. We live in a world where phones and other devices control our lives, so why not use it for a good purpose? Bound together by technology, we can work together, get help from one another, and most importantly, teach each other how to engineer our future together.