SteamHead’s Wix website dates from 2014, the same year as its sister site theMake.club. Its footer said ”© 2014 SteamHead”, and for the next few years it was the front door to a small makerspace in Shekou, Shenzhen. The blog is now moving to WordPress. Before the old site goes, here is what it held.
A room in Shekou
The Wix site described a place you could walk into: Room 205, Building A of the Hua Guo Shan Building in Shekou, Nanshan. Walk-in hours ran Monday to Friday, 10:00am to 4:30pm, with weekends by appointment. You could reach us by email or on WeChat. The menu told you what mattered: MakerSpace, Workshops, Events, School Services, Blog.
There was also a resident room, listed for visiting makers and educators, with a set of resident guidelines. It mattered more than its size suggests, because it is how SteamHead hosted people from outside Shenzhen.
Workshops for kids
In October 2017 the site posted a run of workshops, each built around making something real:
- VR Architects — students modelled buildings in 3D and walked through them with VR headsets. One model was to host a VR Maker Exhibition shared with students in the US.
- LED Bling! — wearable electronics and costume design, with a path to a Make Fashion student exhibit in Spring 2018.
- Make it Move — sixteen sessions in which every student built a mechanical car, an electric boat and a remote-controlled quadcopter, plus the obstacle courses to test them.
360 Fashion and a two-part Shoot a Guy workshop were listed alongside them.
Maker ed for schools
The School Services pages priced the work plainly. MakerEd At School ran at 400 RMB per 45 minutes. Language of Make taught the vocabulary of making in an all-English environment. MakerEd After School brought a 90-minute class to a school, with time for students and parents to share at the end. Tutoring with a Maker Mentor covered one to three students. Educators travelled within Nanshan, and further for a fee.
The teacher list read like a roster of the community: Jonathan Reed, Tully, Craig, Luke, James and MrHack.
Free, and meant to be used
The thread running through the site was that maker education should be shared. SteamHead Education Services split the work in two. Maker Ed Empower gave resources away: Maker Badges to organise classroom maker experiences, an equipment list from local suppliers, the Taobao list of purchases for maker projects, and a weekly Maker Ed Meetup for teachers. PBL Connect worked with schools directly on classes, professional development and Project Based Learning.
SteamHead was also the community partner of EIN, a monthly bilingual meetup held at a different Shenzhen school each time, where the host school showed its innovations and teachers left with short, usable presentations.
James’ Maker Ed Milestones put the idea most directly: “just open sourcing isn’t enough. We need to do something to help people use it!”
Residents and visitors
Through SteamHead R.ED, the site documented people who came to make and teach. Anina, an international model turned maker, ran workshops on e-wear, kombucha bio-leather and LED bling and spoke to the local hardware community, reaching about 30 students, 20 teachers and 100 makers. Helen Steer came through the British Council’s Hello Shenzhen residency programme. Profiles introduced Twila Busby, a long-time advocate of Project Based Learning, and Luke Henderson, a UK maker who had made Shenzhen home.
Beyond Shenzhen
Not everything happened in Shekou. Each year the Desert Trip brought electronics from Shenzhen to schools and student clubs in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Blue House Hub offered something Shenzhen could not: a secluded spot in the Mojave Desert with room for large projects and large thoughts.
What carries over
The posts that mattered most are restored on this site and tagged Wix archive, with their original dates. The rest of the Wix site — its pages, prices and the posts whose pages were never saved — is kept in SteamHead’s archive. The ideas are the part that moves forward: make real things, share what works, and help people use it.
This post was reconstructed in 2026 from the archived Wix site and is dated to mark the move to WordPress, whose first post appeared on May 11, 2018. It was drafted by Blake, SteamHead’s AI teammate, and reviewed by a person before publishing.