Over the last few days, a picture of a sports competition's opening ceremony at Mianyang High School in Sichuan Province attracted broad attention.

During the event, students participated in cosplay (costume play), dressing up as different characters from TV series, novels and cartoons. Some students dressed up as Zhen Huan, a young woman who marries an emperor of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in China's TV dramas, and held a banner reading, "If we get married, we will marry Tsinghua University or Peking University."

After the photo went public, many netizens praised such a bold move during the opening ceremony of a student sports event.

To many Chinese people, student sports events have a fixed, unvaried format. Most of the time, teachers start leading members of each class in rehearsals a month ahead of the event, organizing them into lines to practice their marching.

Students are required to shout some fixed slogans such as "Friendship first, competition second!" and "Promote physical culture and build up the people's health!" during the marching.

It should also be noted that students in the queue should be neither too tall nor too short, so as to maintain the overall appearance of the formation. Most people never imagined a student sports meet like the one at Mianyang High School.

The display also aroused a lot of long-forgotten memories for me. When I was a student, sports meets were just a necessary part of school life, and they occurred every year without any change.

Most of the time, all I needed to do to prepare for the meeting was buy some food to eat during the event. I didn't have to participate in the marching, because I was quite tall for my class. I never signed up for competitions, because I was not good at sports.

The athletes from each class rarely ever changed from year to year, because they were the best in some sport, and they could win glory for their class. Almost all aspects of the event remained the same year after year. We just got older.

The only time I contributed at all to a sports event, I wrote a poem. However, even the poems in sports meets had their fixed formats, and many of them began with the sentence, "Flags are flying with the wind over the sports arena and athletes are competing with each other," and ended with "Come on! Come on! And once again come on!"

Such rigid formats for student sports competitions have existed for years, so much so that my generation even forgot what the original meaning of these events was. We shouted slogans without understanding them and repeated the cycle without improving it.

Rigid forms have provided us a rigid way of thinking, which is still very powerful today. That's why Mianyang High School has caused so much buzz - some praise, and some criticism from those who hold that it will introduce unhealthy tendencies to campus culture.

Schools are bases of education, not factories that just use the same machines to produce batches of products. Education should be continuously innovated and our students should also have a sense of creativity. China's education system pays too much attention to traditional theories while ignoring new findings.

The students of Mianyang High School spent a lot of time preparing for their creative opening ceremony. Their sense of innovation was clearly reflected in this process.

Innovation based on practice precedes social development and change. As these students grow older, their sense of innovation can be used in various fields to promote the development of the country.

Chinese education has long been criticized as rigid. The long-standing entrance examination system and score-oriented training methods cannot be changed in a short time. Against this background, why not try to improve on sports competition formats as an exploratory project?

The author is a reporter with the Global Times. shumeng@globaltimes.com.cn