Introduction#
A year ago, my BBS asked me: “What do you think if I were to apply for an honorary diploma?” At that time, my impression of the honorary diploma was limited to the materials I looked up while answering Rookie multiple-choice questions when I first enrolled. Today, a year later, I received the notice that the honorary diploma application has begun. Time flies, and those emotions and memories surging in my heart have come to the surface.
I · Club | Sharp Thinking, Breaking Boundaries; Visioning the Unseen#
At the beginning of my enrollment, I joined the Red Brick Club. At that time, Red Brick was a unique “brick”—it played a different melody compared to the micro-movie club The Piano in a Factory; it was the pure observer among the “photography” clubs. However, between static images and flowing films, there exists a subtle intertwining. Although Red Brick had won campus acclaim for its proficiency and refinement in photography, it rarely ventured into the field of cinematic creation. And I, in that gap, filled its incompleteness.
At that time, I already had 3-4 years of experience in video creation, had worked on video projects of various sizes, and was familiar with common industry-grade video editing software. I led Red Brick into the new territory of cinematic creation.
Starting with internal Red Brick projects, short films like the “Teacher’s Day Red Brick Special Planning Interview” and the “Neon Cafe Promo” were like early winter snowflakes falling on the club’s soil. Gradually, I gained recognition within the club.
In the summer of my freshman year (High 1), BDFZ’s annual “Soccer Cup” arrived as scheduled. That year’s Soccer Cup was a major challenge for Red Brick—we took on the heavy responsibility of producing the school-level annual Soccer Cup promo and documentary. I was responsible for the editing of both films.
During discussions with team members, I learned about the style of previous promos—most followed the same template: fixed shots of training on the field; interviewing some students to express their outlook; and ending with team members cheering together to show their determination to win, set to high-energy BGM. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Yes. Such a promo is indeed a “standard answer.” But the problem was: the audience already had “aesthetic fatigue.” Year after year, it was “new wine in old bottles.” While these videos performed well in terms of whipping up the atmosphere on-site, they struggled to leave a lasting impression on the audience. For students who weren’t particularly interested in soccer to begin with, it might even feel boring.
So, we decided to try something new. We abandoned the “fixed template” of previous promos and de-emphasized the Soccer Cup itself, instead trying to express the theme of soccer through cinematic language. We drew inspiration from the creativity of the 2018 Apple Event, constructing a story full of twists and suspense—
As the opening ceremony is about to begin, Student A, who is responsible for delivering the “soccer ball” to the ceremony host “Liu-ge,” arrives late. He runs all the way holding the box containing the ball.
Upon reaching the agreed location, “Liu-ge” is nowhere to be found. After asking around, he receives a new address from “Liu-ge”—the sports field.
After experiencing various difficulties such as being stopped by “security” and finding passages locked, A finally reaches the sports field but still can’t find “Liu-ge.” Upon checking again, he realizes that the location Liu-ge sent was actually the underground Xinjian Gym—from a vertical position, it looks exactly like the sports field.
A rushes underground, but another accident occurs—he accidentally trips, and the soccer ball happens to be “kicked” into the elevator.
Unexpectedly, “Liu-ge,” who was waiting on the second basement floor, happens to walk to the elevator door. The elevator doors slowly open, and the task of delivering the soccer ball is “successfully completed.”
In this promo, I served as the lead producer. This included scriptwriting, shot design, and production; the final editing was handled entirely by me alone. Together, we delivered an excellent result for Red Brick’s first attempt at promo production. Judging from the reaction at the Soccer Cup opening ceremony, everyone was surprised and delighted by this novel “promo” format.
In the subsequent Soccer Cup documentary, we innovatively cut in from the perspectives of onlookers like the audience, photographers, teachers, and volunteers, using their viewpoints to describe the story of this Soccer Cup—besides the athletes, the stories of the staff behind the scenes are equally worth recording. During the editing process, I interspersed the stories of various characters and switched the perspective back to the athletes themselves at the end; the entire film used slow-motion techniques to construct a poetic narrative.
This documentary received enthusiastic praise from all parties. The most obvious result was that the “double-film” production for future Soccer Cups was also handed over to Red Brick. The Red Brick Club gradually took on the responsibility of producing films for the school in a standardized manner. Although I did not participate in the creation of the new year’s Soccer Cup films, seeing my juniors maintain Red Brick’s high standards, I couldn’t help but feel: it’s as if I “created history.”
Furthermore, as one of the core members of the Red Brick Club, I was also responsible for various other tasks. For example, in terms of “photography,” I was responsible for shooting the drama Chasing Light, the Drama Festival makeup photos, the Basketball Cup opening ceremony, and other “core duties” of Red Brick. Additionally, I archived Red Brick’s scanned old photos, organized materials for the collaboration with SONY, set up exhibitions for Alumni Day…
II · Academy | The Rhythm of Xinmin, Endless Publicity#
“Inclusive yet independent in thought, excellent with a constant sense of grace.”
Xinmin Academy is an inclusive existence. The community of Xinmin Academy was the first large collective I joined. After a week of enrollment education, I was deeply attracted and gradually fell in love with this group. While being embraced by the warmth of this big family, I also did my best to give back to this soil that provided me with growth, utilizing my strengths by joining the Publicity Project Group.
During the enrollment education process, I worked with my classmates to produce the academy’s enrollment documentary. This was the first collaboration of my high school career, and I cherish every moment of it. Subsequently, in my work, I also made many contributions. I continued to utilize my video editing skills—in the Basketball Cup promo, I was responsible for special effects and editing; I also participated in the production of the Drama Festival documentary.
In the second half of High 1, the leadership transition arrived. As a core member of the Publicity Project Group, I took on the role of head of the group, starting to manage and operate Xinmin Academy’s official WeChat account and Bilibili channel.
“With great power comes great responsibility.” In my position as the head of the Publicity Project Group, I remained as dedicated as ever, handling Xinmin Academy’s external publicity matters and attracting many talented new members from the Class of 2025 to join the publicity family.
Regarding the academy’s enrollment affairs, I didn’t serve as a lead member of the core team like other enrollment project groups, but I provided back-end support throughout. For instance, I published and edited recruitment posts, contacted freshmen in external liaison groups, and designed and deployed an auto-reply system for the academy’s support WeChat account “Xinmin Salty Little Fish” based on regular expression matching.
III · Technology | Surpassing the Clouds, A Unique Perspective#
BDFZ AI#
🔗 bdfz.app
Peking University First External School (BDFZ) is unique. Here, there are no fixed classes, no homeroom teachers, and no class groups. Instead, we have a floating class system, the See-Hi platform, and knowledge base documents. As a central club in the school, SubIT has long been committed to doing a good job in the digital enrollment education for freshmen. Even so, faced with a vast array of regulations and materials, freshmen usually have to search across multiple platforms like Yuque and SharePoint.
Thus, I developed BDFZ AI—a tool for instant search and explanation of school documents.
Similar to “ChatGPT,” students can ask questions to BDFZ AI to quickly search for and obtain information on school regulations, student handbooks, course settings, leave procedures, and more. Whether they are freshmen or current students, they can use this project to easily find information regarding course selection, campus facilities, event schedules, etc.
Example questions:
The dataset for BDFZ AI covers common document resources including the BDFZ Student Handbook, High School Student Affairs Handbook, course handbooks for the Main Campus and Dalton Academy, the BDFZ Diploma Scheme, and the Club Operation and Management Scheme. Students only need to ask questions easily to get answers that previously required laboriously checking various knowledge bases.
More than just “ChatGPT,” this is more like a “BDFZ-exclusive ChatGPT.” The principle behind it can be understood as me “feeding” “all” the school’s course handbooks, student handbooks, affairs handbooks, etc., to ChatGPT and then asking it questions. However, these documents combined often exceed hundreds of thousands of words, and feeding them all at once is currently impossible—ChatGPT’s maximum token limit is restricted to 4096 tokens.
Tokens are the term for splitting a piece of text into individual words, punctuation marks, or other linguistic units. For example, the word “hamburger” is split into three tokens: “ham”, “bur”, and “ger”, while short and common words like “pear” are a single token. The number of tokens processed in an API request depends on the length of the input and output. A rough rule of thumb is that for English text, 1 token is approximately equal to 4 characters or 0.75 words, while a Chinese word breaks down into 2/3 tokens.
Therefore, I used Embeddings technology to convert school documents and user queries into numerical vectors, and then performed information retrieval in a vector space based on semantic similarity to find the most relevant parts to the user’s question. Even if the wording of the query and the document is not exactly the same, relevant information can be found effectively. Afterward, BDFZ AI organizes the information, chooses its wording, and outputs the result via the OpenAI Chat Completion API.
Text Embeddings are a tool for measuring the relatedness of text strings. An embedding is a vector of floating-point numbers. The distance between two vectors measures their relatedness, with smaller distances indicating higher relatedness.
For example, when asking about school rules and discipline, it first extracts keywords like “flag-raising ceremony” and “tardy,” and matches the page sections most related to these keywords.
As seen from the console log below: the similarity for flag-raising ceremony regulations is 87.3%, and the similarity for attendance, leave, and tardiness system regulations is 80.5%.
BDFZ AI doesn’t stop at simply finding document content. It can do more than what the search box on Yuque can. For example, after a year of math study, Dalton Academy students can freely choose between studying Statistics or Calculus in High 2. When asking BDFZ AI “Should I take Statistics or Calculus in Dalton?”, it answers:
“This depends on your personal interests and future study plans. If you are interested in statistics and hope to study related majors in university, then you should choose Statistics. If you plan to study majors like mathematics, physics, or computer science in university which require high-level mastery of calculus, then you should choose Calculus. Please note that choosing Calculus requires passing Advanced Algebra or Integrated Math HL first. Refer to the relevant introductions for Statistics I and Calculus 1 SL.”
This content is summarized by BDFZ AI from the original English documents of Dalton Academy.
Additionally, BDFZ AI can provide course selection advice for students. When asked “I am interested in neuroscience at Dalton,” BDFZ AI suggests that the student take the course “The Aging Brain at the End of the World: Human Society and Senile Dementia” offered by Dalton.
This is very valuable for Dalton students. Because in the international department, students need to choose and plan courses based on their professional interests and future study plans. For students hoping to apply for undergraduate studies and who have already determined their major direction, their course selection needs to correspond with their major to demonstrate their passion and professional ability in that field. Therefore, when choosing courses, they need to carefully read and understand the description of each course to ensure the selected courses align with their professional goals.
However, due to the vast amount of document information and complex content, students often have to spend a lot of time finding and understanding these course descriptions, which brings a certain amount of pressure and trouble to their academic life. Therefore, a tool like BDFZ AI, through its instant search and document explanation functions, can help students plan their learning paths and course selections more efficiently, thereby better meeting their professional goals and learning needs.
In the future, BDFZ AI will open API ports for third-party use. In this way, Xinmin Academy’s “Salty Little Fish” can become an AI in the true sense.
Currently, BDFZ AI is open for free to BDFZ teachers and students. You only need to log in through your school email.
BTW:
Why can’t I search for the content I want?
BDFZ AI builds a text index from school-related files in the database, so if the content related to the question is not explicitly written in the school files, it will not be able to return an accurate answer. Additionally, you can try asking in a different way, such as “Academy Activity Room” vs “Academy Hub”. If there is still no answer, you can click the button to submit feedback.
Website: https://bdfz.app
ELP Project List#
Previous ELP project lists were implemented through Baidu Netdisk sharing. However, due to the slow download speeds for non-members and the unclear display of course details, the user experience was never very good.
So, commissioned by Dalton Academy, I developed a website to display the ELP project list. The category, location, price, and whether accommodation is required for each project are marked on the main page. Combined with a search and filter function, it makes it convenient for students to quickly find their favorite projects without having to click through Baidu Netdisk folders one by one to read PDFs.
The category, location, price, and whether accommodation is required for each project are marked on the main page, combined with a search filter function to help students quickly find their preferred projects.
To optimize the user experience, I chose to use the Next.js framework. Next.js is a React-based JavaScript framework that supports Server-Side Rendering (SSR), providing better loading performance. It enables client-side navigation, meaning the entire page doesn’t need to refresh when switching pages, greatly increasing the speed and smoothness of page transitions.
For the database, I used Supabase, which is based on PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is an advanced open-source relational database with excellent performance in data consistency and scalability. Using the graphical database editor provided by Supabase, teachers can easily modify content and upload or store files.
Furthermore, considering that foreign teachers at Dalton Academy need to view ELP projects, I was also commissioned to add an English version to the website. Unlike most websites that require reloading the entire page to switch languages, I utilized the i18n (internationalization) support and SSR features of Next.js to achieve seamless switching between Chinese and English.
This website was the first large-scale to-C project I developed at Dalton. At the ELP launch event, when the website’s QR code was displayed on the large screen, I kept the analytics page open in the background, watching the real-time online users and visit counts continue to grow, feeling once again that I am “build and publish wonderful things.”
Electronic “Command Game”#
🔗 Electronic Command Game Implementation Based on Socket.IO
Postscript#
Reflecting on my two years of high school, I am actually a bit surprised by how many things I’ve done. Academy Publicity Project Group, Red Brick Club, and various projects… I’ll leave a few more pictures at the end—
Finally, at the very end—Cheers 🎉
