Digital Heritage in Your Classroom
A four-session K–12 workshop where students explore East Asian cultural heritage through virtual reality, oracle bone script, 3D printing, and a museum visit.
City Elementary School · Chicago, Illinois · Spring 2026
Program Overview
The 2026 Giving Back Workshop brought together the Center for the Art of East Asia (CAEA) at the University of Chicago and City Elementary School in Hyde Park, Chicago. Through hands-on activities, students explored East Asian cultural heritage and artifacts, including oracle bones, oracle bone script, and Buddhist sculpture. Using virtual reality, 3D models, and 3D printing technologies, students discovered how museums and cultural institutions use digital tools to study, preserve, and share objects from the past.
Topics Covered
Workshop Objective
This workshop aims to help students discover that cultural relics and art history are both vibrant and deeply relevant to modern life. We use the Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project (DCADP) as a basis for these approaches—the DCADP uses 3D modeling and machine learning to digitally restore cultural heritage captured from museums and historic sites and then presents these materials as interactive web experiences and VR for exhibitions.
Session Timeline (45 mins each)
Four Sessions
Imagining Yourself as a Shang Dynasty Priest — Chinese Heritage Through VR and 3D Models
Students were handed Meta Quest 3 headsets and asked to imagine themselves as Shang dynasty diviners. Inside the virtual space, they held, rotated, and examined 3D models of oracle bones — objects that are usually seen only behind museum glass.
One student raised the virtual oracle bone in front of his classmates and spontaneously performed divination as a Shang dynasty priest. The session sparked questions about 3D scanning, museum collections, and digital preservation.
Teachers' Comments
“I think using the VR gadget was a great introduction to the three dimensionality of the relics. The sample replicas were powerful reminders of the material culture of Ancient China. Students could connect this with another visit to a different museum [such as] The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC). In so doing they can see that different geographic regions’ use of materials speak to the identity of specific cultures.”
“Thanks so much for the wonderful materials and instructional time balanced with interactive and engaging hands on activities!”
Digital Heritage in Your Classroom
Bring this workshop to your school!
Digital Heritage in Your Classroom is available to K–12 schools across Chicago. Each series is four sessions, approximately 45 minutes each, and customized to your grade levels and learning goals.
Email Us to Get StartedProgram at a Glance
Made possible by the Cyrus Tang Foundation
“We believe in the creative potential of people who care about making a difference in the world.”Stella Liang, President — Cyrus Tang Foundation
About the Facilitator
Digital Collections Curator
“This opportunity to bring our research to the wider Chicago community means a great deal to me — City Elementary is a school dedicated to building bonds and community, and I am truly honored to have worked alongside them. At the heart of this experience was the idea of using digital methods to combine students' own hand-drawn creations with our specialized data expertise to produce a customized oracle bone — helping students feel emotionally closer to ancient East Asian artifacts.”
This workshop is part of CAEA's Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project (DCADP) — an ongoing initiative to digitally reunite Chinese cultural artifacts dispersed across institutions worldwide, and to share them with the public through open digital tools, virtual reality, and 3D models.
Learn about the DCADP →