The School of Design has been providing a design subject for engineering students since 1998. The subject aims at enriching students' experience in creative thinking, as well other design activities. Through project activities, each student attending the subject is required to initiate a design idea, and later to put the idea into practice. The first evaluation of the subject was conducted in 1999. The results show that engineering students, who normally tackle problems pre-defmed by teachers/supervisors or with only limited choices, find it difficult to initiate "creative" ideas without a direction and well- defined scope. Thus, in 1999/2000, instead of designing and innovating objects without any guidelines or boundaries, or, on the contrary, being provided with fixed/limited topics, the students were encouraged to respect cultures and users' practices in order to identify needs and opportunities, and then develop their ideas. The results of the subject evaluation in 2000 indicate that respecting cultures and users' practices is a good direction and scope set for students to carry out creativity activities, particularly for those students without much experience in initiating creative ideas. On the one hand, it allows students a certain degree of guidance in initiating ideas. On the other hand, it does not limit the possibility for students to initiate and develop their ideas, as "cultures and users' practices" is a dynamic everyday life topic which allows students much flexibility to investigate and explore, and a good basis for generating ideas. This paper explains the concept of respecting cultures and users' practice, and the rationale underlying student creativity activities. By illustrating some of the students' work and the results of evaluations, the paper discusses the advantages and limitations of this kind of idea initiation activities for students in general and for engineering students in particular.

Games teaching in Hong Kong lies heavily on the teaching of techniques. Evidence which reflects the current situation of games teaching in Hong Kong, can be found from physical education curriculum, the views of physical education lecturers, national governing bodies and secondary school teachers of physical education.
Teaching games for understanding (TGFU) is an innovation in games teaching. It was first documented and introduced to Hong Kong in 1994. Subsequently, several studies have been conducted to investigate the affective aspects of physical education teachers and students by teaching Basketball and Volleyball with two different approaches - the skill-based approach and the TGFU approach. The findings indicated that the teachers and students found the new teaching approach more enjoyable. Hence, this research supports the adoption of TGFU by physical education teachers as Hong Kong moves towards the 21 sI Century.

In recent years, much research has been conducted on environmental citizenship, particularly on indicators for environmental citizenship. Recent findings suggested that one of the effective ways of cultivating environmental citizenship is through formal education in schools. This paper describes the “Green School” initiative, the theoretical background and its implementation in Hong Kong. The development of the criteria for a “Green School” will also be described in this paper.

The paper argues that the overall process of curriculum development (from the intended official written curriculum to the resourced curriculum set out in textbooks, and then to the taught implemented curriculum) in the two cities has been influenced by similar socio-political forces, It also argues that the process is characterized by some similar and some varying complex patterns in the nature and extent of Chinese and non-Chinese music which is not adequately recognized in the existing literatures. The study contends that the national identity, preference of national and local cultures, national education, colonial education, and acceptances of, and relationships with, other cultures have played important roles in shaping the nature and extent of Chinese and non-Chinese elements in the music curriculum.