Workshop Collection, festival for creative activities

　The path that leads to Keio University, a few hundred meters in length, gets packed with parents and children.  Once a year, children gather and fill this town with joyful cheers and shouts.  It’s the opening of “Workshop Collection”, a workshop gallery for children for creating creative contents.
It’s all here, orthodox analog workshops to those using the latest digital technology.  It’s also a great opportunity for researchers, firms, scholars, artists, and parents involved in the festival to get together.

  Last year, the 9th festival, we saw over 100,000 participants!  It’s the largest creative event for children in the world.  It might surprise you, but Japan is home of such activities.  Bet you didn’t know that.  CANVAS, an NPO and the Media Design Research Group of Keio University (KMD) host the festival.
Over 100 workshop teams participated.  There are analog activities that use clay and handcrafts, but there are also a number of digital workshops where you can make an animation using a computer, create a game with your own characters, create your own digital newspaper, battle using images of robots, create your own instrument with an iPad, program and control a robot on a computer, and create a character and virtually communicate with people around the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5z5wDXwO84

Participation from firms is becoming more intense.  Benesse, Mujirushi, Asahi Newspaper, Fuji TV, TBS, Microsoft, Yahoo, Daiichi Seimei, Olympus, NHK, NTT, and more.  Also, recent trend indicates an increase in digital workshops.  Last year, we saw many workshops utilizing tablet devices and smartphones.
But there is one thing that never changes.  It’s always crowded.  We’re sorry.  Demands for such activities far exceed the supply.  Wouldn’t it be great, if instead of an annual event, there were multiple fixed workshop centers all around the country that anyone could participate at anytime?  
How do we train amazing creators or producers that is “Hollywood” material?  This is an urgent and crucial matter for higher education sectors.  This is the core concern of the contents industry today.  But at the same time, digital technology has become available for everyone.  This means that raising the standard of creativity is more important than ever.  To do this, we must reach out to elementary schools, education policies, and regional policies.
A few years back, the Japanese government set a goal.  “Increase the number of children who participates in creative workshops to 350,000 by 2020”.  Interestingly enough, this goal was set based on the number of participants at the Workshop Collection.  We’re already at 100,000.  It doesn’t seem that far.  Let’s get it done!