——School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University
Student Party Branch and Qin’an No. 5 Middle School Jointly Build a Maker Club with Significant Achievements
Party Building Leads to Collective Strength
Scientific Innovation Empowers Development
Under the guidance of the national strategy of “Revitalizing the Country through Science and Education” and the rural revitalization policy, the Student Party Branch of the School of Information Science and Technology at Southwest Jiaotong University has joined hands with Qin’an No. 5 Middle School in Gansu Province to deeply cultivate technology innovation education. Based on the platform of the graduate student teaching support team, they have fully utilized the role of students from the School of Information in previous graduate student teaching support teams, and successfully built a maker education platform through an innovative model of “Party Building + Professional Empowerment”.Recently, three students from Qin’an No. 5 Middle School broke through the competition in the 2025 Qin’an County Third “Tianyi Cup” Maker Programming Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Robot Competition, advancing to the city-level competition, achieving the school’s first award in artificial intelligence innovation competitions, marking significant results in the joint construction of the maker club.
Party Building Leads to Building a New Platform for Scientific Innovation Education
In November 2024, the 2023-11 Party Branch, 2024-11 Party Branch, and the Second Party Branch of the Railway went to Qin’an No. 5 Middle School for on-site research. In response to the school’s situation of “insufficient teaching staff and inadequate club facilities,” they formulated a plan for the construction of the maker club, which received high recognition and full support from the school leadership of Qin’an No. 5 Middle School, clearly defining a dual-track model of “cloud-based MOOCs + offline workshops” to build a systematic maker curriculum system covering Mind + programming and hardware construction.
Party members leverage their professional advantages, assisting on-site in building the maker lab, equipping it with computers, Arduino components, and other devices, and holding the club’s launch ceremony and themed lectures.The secretary of the 2024-11 Party Branch and the 25th Graduate Student Teaching Support Team, Zhang Yuancheng, introduced the concept of maker education in an accessible manner during the lecture, inspiring students’ innovative awareness through global case studies. At the same time, popular science teaching activities integrated information technology with physics knowledge in interactive experiments, allowing students to experience the charm of technology through hands-on practice.
Dual Empowerment, Building a Long-term Support Mechanism
To achieve sustainable delivery of educational resources, the backbone of the Party Branch connects with the resources of the laboratory, mobilizing party members and youth league members to build a remote digital platform, regularly conducting online classes, and equipping the club with guiding teachers to ensure effective implementation of the courses. The online platform not only provides real-time interactive teaching but also integrates learning materials, toolkits, and online courses, forming a closed-loop training model of “online theoretical guidance – offline practical operation – real-time feedback improvement”.This “hardware + software” dual-support assistance system, has enabled the maker education at Qin’an No. 5 Middle School to develop from nothing to something, and from something to excellence, gradually achieving standardized and systematic development.
Initial Achievements, Igniting the Spark of Innovation in the West
After more than half a year of careful cultivation, students from the maker club at Qin’an No. 5 Middle School have emerged in the 2025 county-level competition, winning the qualification to advance to the city-level competition.
Qin’an No. 5 Middle School expressed in a letter of thanks that the jointly built maker club has illuminated the dream of innovation for students in the West,and looks forward to deepening cooperation in teacher training, curriculum co-construction, and resource sharing, allowing the spark of scientific innovation education to form a prairie fire across the western region.
Supporting the construction of middle school maker clubs is an important measure of the “Red Core” ideological and political construction of the School of Information,and achieving outstanding results in practice is an interpretation of how the Party and Youth League organizations in the information field can play their roles in conjunction with their specialties.
In the future, the college’s Party Committee will continue to strengthen the integration of Party building and Youth League building, highlight disciplinary characteristics, enhance the leadership of the “Red Core” ideology, and continuously cultivate students’ sense of social responsibility in the School of Information, while continuing to explore the integrated model of “Red Core” ideological and political leadership across large, medium, and small institutions,and continuously expand the effectiveness and influence of support.
Author: Liao Fan
Editor: Zhang Xinyue
First Review: Yu Donglin, Zhang Yuancheng
Second Review: Liao Fan
Third Review: Wu Weiwei
School of Information Science and Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University in Media: [email protected]