Zhabei District Youth Science and Technology Station: one amateur radio station, and a pile of model boats

Basic facts

This section is about the other half of the same building. That half is the Children's Palace — one taught performance, the other taught making things with your hands.

The three characters of "shaokazhan"

"Shaokazhan" is an abbreviation; the full name is "Youth Science and Technology Guidance Station".

The name sounds a little unfamiliar today, but in the 1970s and 1980s it marked out a very definite institutional position:

It was not a school but a "guidance station" — guiding the extra-curricular science and technology activities of the district's primary and middle schools.

That is, it had two identities:

This is where it differed most from the Children's Palace: the Palace was a "palace" (a place), the Station a "station" (an institution). A palace is for people to come to; a station sends people out.

That radio set

The most unusual thing in the Station was a youth amateur radio station.

"Amateur radio station" is a phrase children today probably do not follow. It means: a real radio set that can transmit outward and talk to people far away, used by "amateur radio enthusiasts" — not professional communicators, just ordinary people, out of interest.

In the 1980s, what did it mean for a middle-school pupil to get his hands on a set that could send Morse?

• it needed a licence;
• it needed a call sign (one per station, unique in the world);
• you had to understand radio propagation — when you could reach a distant station depended on the ionosphere;
• you had to know Morse code, or at least voice operation.

This was a whole set of real-world skills, not exercises in a textbook.

Alongside the radio went 160-metre radio direction finding — a kind of "radio hide-and-seek": a signal source is hidden, and you hunt for it with a direction-finding set. The activity later became one of the Station's strengths, placing year after year in city competitions.

Model boats, model aircraft, and a room full of specimens

The Station's regular subjects were, in the phrase of the day, "model boats and aircraft" — the two under one name.

"Hundred Biology Projects" was a flagship Shanghai youth science programme of that era: children found a hundred biology topics to work through themselves — grow a pot of plants, raise a batch of silkworms, watch a tree for a year. It sounds plain, but it was the earliest "project-based learning".

The specimen room was the least classroom-like room in the building: row after row of cabinets holding things steeped in preservative, pinned to boards, pressed between papers. A child going in for the first time would usually pause — so this is what a "specimen" means.

Odyssey of the Mind

In the late 1980s the Station introduced Odyssey of the Mind (OM).

It is a team problem-solving competition: you are given a long-term problem (say, "build a load-bearing structure from specified materials") and a spontaneous problem (given on the spot, with a few minutes to prepare), and it rests on hands plus ideas plus teamwork.

Shanghai was an important stop in OM's spread in China. The Zhabei Station was one of the earlier units to take it up, and later placed in city and national competitions.

What is OM most like? Most like what people later called "education for all-round quality" — but it appeared twenty years before the phrase, and it is a competition, with winners and losers, and you have to make things with your hands.

How science activity in a district was organised

A large part of the Station's daily work was not in its own building but among the district's several dozen primary and middle schools.

Its activities included:

• the district students' science festival (every year)
• various cup competitions: the "Hetian Cup" and "Qingyun Cup" small-project contests, the "Shixiao Cup" computer contest, the OM contest, the "Hundred Biology Projects" contest
• summer science popularisation: science summer camps, a science imagination hall, science popularisation for ten thousand homes, a science growth camp

Note the names of those cups: Hetian, Qingyun, Shixiao (Shixiao being Experimental Primary School). The cups are named after schools — which shows that science activity was not the Station's work alone, but that a group of schools each had a strength and took turns as host.

This way of organising things — "the district builds the stage, the schools put on the play" — was the typical structure of out-of-school education in that era. It was more homespun than "setting up one central institution", but its reach was far wider.

Palace and station, joined under one name

The Children's Palace (1960s) and the Station (1970s) each worked in the same building for twenty or thirty years.

One taught dancing and singing, one taught model boats and radio; one turned out young performers, one young inventors.

Later the two merged, under the name the Station-Palace.

The merged name says a good deal: neither was willing to be dropped. "Station" comes first — because at the time of the merger it was the larger, with more departments; "Palace" comes after — but it was the earlier one, the building's first name.

One building, two names, fifty years.

To the children who once took classes here it did not matter what it was called. What they remember is: Saturday morning, schoolbag on your back, off to No. 151 Zhijiang West Road.

Why such a place matters

Almost nothing the Station taught was "useful":

• being able to send Morse would not get you into university;
• being able to build a model boat would not put food on the table;
• knowing a hundred plants would not buy you a mark.

But it gave a group of children one thing: to make something with your own hands, and make it move.

A model boat went into the water and really went forward; a radio station was set up and really picked up a signal from far away; an OM structure stood up and really carried the weight.

That experience of "the thing I made is real" is hard to come by anywhere else.

School gives marks; home gives rules. The Station gave — you have a go yourself.

Connections

• Sub-district：Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict
• See also：Zhijiang West Road Subdistrict, Zhabei District Children's Palace, Zhabei Tourism Vocational School, Pengpu Xincun Subdistrict

Sources: that the Zhabei District Youth Science and Technology Station was built in the 1970s and merged with the Zhabei District Children's Palace (1960s) as the "Station-Palace"; that the institution stood at No. 151 Zhijiang West Road and had more than ten purpose-built classrooms for physics, electronics, model boats and aircraft, amateur radio, computing, photography, environmental protection, biology and invention; that it was equipped with a youth amateur radio station, 160-metre radio direction finding equipment, a zoological and botanical specimen room, a popular-science exhibition room (more than twenty exhibits), an outdoor yard and the Pengpu Hall branch; that it offered Odyssey of the Mind, invention, model boats and aircraft, radio direction finding, Hundred Biology Projects, photography and other subjects; that it hosted the district students' science festival and the "Hetian Cup" and "Qingyun Cup" small-project contests, the "Shixiao Cup" computer contest, the OM contest and the Hundred Biology Projects contest; and that in the summer holidays it ran science summer camps, a science imagination hall, science popularisation for ten thousand homes, a science growth camp and other activities, are based on the Baidu Baike entry "Shanghai Zhabei District Station-Palace", the same entry on 360 Baike, the entry "Shanghai Zhabei District Station-Palace" in the Chinese Encyclopaedia (which records the list of facilities and the departmental structure), the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission's List of Shanghai Youth Activity Centres, Children's Palaces and Science and Technology Stations (2014), and the introduction to the base in Passport (Experience Handbook) of Shanghai Pengpu Middle School (Grade B; "the 1970s" is a summary formulation for which no exact year was found, and is Grade C). The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.