This week the Art Department at St Andrews International School Bangkok has been reflecting on what the concept of growth mindset means to us in art.
Across High School subjects students are encouraged to adopt a ‘growth mindset’, actively seeking feedback on how to improve the quality of their work and persevering in the face of challenges. Many people believe that students either have a natural ability to draw or are simply ‘no good at art’. In the STA Art Department we prefer to believe that there is no wrong answer in art and that the quality of student artwork can be enhanced in many different ways, such as how effectively an idea is communicated or how techniques and processes have been manipulated to suit a student’s intentions. The bottom line is that hard work always leads to better results and in art hard work means two things, sustained experimentation and creative risk-taking. We believe these are the key attributes that define the growth mindset in art. This week Year 8 students are working on developing a Cubist style still life composition and have been asked to use a combination of tonal drawing, collage and 3D card construction. The work is highly experimental and we have been very impressed with how our young artists have risen to this creative challenge and demonstrating some ‘out of the box’ thinking. Here are some examples of their work in progress. (Work by Anna, Doris, Chicha and Pin)
This week our ‘Artist of the Week’ award goes to Emma Cha in Year 8. Emma’s Cubist still life drawing cleverly uses multiple perspectives to create a layered and complex composition. Her subtle use of graduated tone adds to the suggestion of shallow depth.
With the goal of providing meaningful help to the flood victims in the northern regions of Thailand, our entire community at St Andrews Bangkok came together to raise funds and donations for the affected families. In the span of a few short weeks, added to donations of food and clothing, we managed to raise an astounding total of 386,676.50 THB in donation funds. To all students, teachers, parents, and staff who participated in our efforts and contributed to this cause—thank you!
Last Friday, the STA Primary campus was transformed into a celebration of all things maths! The day was packed with engaging, hands-on activities across all year groups, making maths truly come alive for our students.
Senior student at St Andrews Bangkok, Pun (Year 13), devises an innovative solution for effective waste management. Recently, he completed an ambitious project: an AI-powered waste sorting system. After much research and testing, he got the system to work and put the model to use in one of our rooms at school!
Physics students from St Andrews Bangkok made quite an impression at the Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition and won the Best Outreach Award for their brilliant work. BL4S is a prestigious global physics contest organised by CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland) and DESY (the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany), inviting High School students worldwide to propose detailed experiments to be conducted at a particle accelerator beamline. While our students did not win the main prize of conducting their experiment in Geneva, they still stood out and were recognised from an entry of over 400 teams.
