The audio tour guide covers Wang Yangming’s biography, the former residence introduction, his philosophy and its later generation. The audio tour guide is translated and recorded by 11 FoSE students from different UG programmes including Environmental Sciences, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Statistics, Environmental Engineering and Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Students had spent a year studying Wang Yangming’s philosophical doctrines and then finished the translation work of the script and recording.

Professor Tao Wu, Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering, highly values the audio tour guide made by our students. It is a good practice of “learning by doing”. Faculty of Science and Engineering emphasises the “hands on” practical experience in the curriculum. Through and “project-based learning” and “problem-based learning”, students get a chance to practice the knowledge they learn in the classroom to solve the real world challenges.

The students group leader, Kevin Li, a Year 3 Environmental Sciences student also expressed that through this project, he profoundly noticed the importance of teamwork, innovation and progress tracking so that the project could be completed effectively within a short time. He also gain a better understanding of Wang Yangming’s theory of the unity between thought and action.

Wang Yangming (王陽明, 1472–1529) was a Ming Dynasty Chinese idealist Neo-Confucian scholar–official. After Zhu Xi, he is commonly considered the most important Neo-Confucian thinker, with an interpretation of Confucianism that denied the rationalist dualism found in the orthodox philosophy of Zhu Xi. He was the leading figure in the Neo-Confucian School of Mind, which championed an interpretation of Mencius (a Classical Confucian) that unified knowledge and action. Wang Yang-ming's most important contribution to Chinese philosophy was his radical metaphysical idealism. More specifically, he argued for the unity of the mind (xin) and principle (li), the latter of which, in Neo-Confucian thought, was seen as the the ultimate metaphysical nature of reality.