Peter Robbinson visits Singapore and China!

Our Senior Houdini Instructor, Peter Robbinson went on a whirlwind visit with our Asia Pacific Rep TK Ng to train classrooms in Singapore and China a few weeks ago. Here are a few highlights from his time at Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP ), where SESI has an Asia Pacific Headquarters in Singapore and Crystal Institute of Digital Education in Beijing, China.

Peter on his first day of training at NYP:

.... I focus on two main themes, the procedural workflow and how data is handled and shared thorough out houdini. The later point is not something that can be appreciated right away but needs to be upfront right from the beginning; "why are there different editors...". The data structure and hip files are essential elements that explain channel referencing and de-mystifies the syntax. Proceduralism is a bit harder to grasp at first, but they do see the potential and it usually stimulates quite a bit of "what if I want to ..." questions. Here's a quick panorama of the classroom, with the teachers on the left and in the center and some of the students who will be travelling to the LA office to become interns. TK is standing, in the blue shirt, on the left.

Peter with the ITE School of IT & Electronics and their staff:

The director of the school is on the right, Ms. Yeo Sock Tin, the young woman in the center with the white shirt is Ms. Zhou Yi Nan (she took my course last week) and teaches game programming. The young woman in the black dress is Ivy Liong Choi Yin is the Section Head of this department (oh my god I'm getting old), and the woman on the left is Ms. Wong Kim Booey, the Course Manager. The Director is very keen on adding Houdini to their curriculum and certianly Ms. Zhou did well in my class.

Peter arrives in Beijing and teaches at Crystal Institute:

I could already tell by the energy in the classroom and the attendance that this training session was going to be a good one. My worries about language problems were also dispelled. Many in the class, more or less, could follow along with my talk and TK was doing a great job with translation. He used a dictionary on his Ipod to help with words he was not familiar with and referred to the class for their examples.

Thanks Peter and TK for bringing some Houdini skills to Asia Pacific :)


Peter Robinson - Senior Trainer
TK Ng - Asia Pacific Houdini Rep (TK@sidefx.com)