what school leaders are saying:

"It was very heartening to hear the projects done by your students. They were so confident and their passion for their subject was evident during their presentation. The students really demonstrated the 3Cs viz., be curious, be creative and be the change, that we hope to instil in our students through STEM. Thank you for giving us an opportunity to learn about STEM projects and possibilities of using AI."

"we have mutually benefitted from the rich learning experience"

"the school is blessed to be able to enjoy this enriching and joyous partnership with you"

 "this is an excellent programme. We would like to continue our collaboration."

"on behalf of the school, I would like to thank Kenneth and his team for their strong support for the project"

"it was a very good experience for our Sec 3 students last year and it helped them think through the different aspects such as relationships between characters and thematic perspectives, so we are keen to see how we can give our current Sec 3 class a similarly enriching experience"

"we are indeed enjoying this whole project"

"thank you very much for sharing your expertise with our boys and guiding them. They enjoyed the sessions and look forward to learning more from you"

"we really appreciate the great support provided. Thank you for going the extra mile"

"thank you for the enriching experience the students gained. Indeed, they were exposed to something related to current reality (how photographs can be doctored to achieve intent). Looking forward to another year of collaboration!"

"this programme is welcomed by our teachers, this is because it enables teachers to address students' misconceptions"

"we like this programme because it is one of the effective approaches to curriculum design; it is easily translatable to a variety of subject disciplines"

"your team has played a very important role in the development of this group of boys. they enjoy the sessions with you, learning new knowledge and skills, and they are always meaningfully engaged. we would like to thank your team for being our partners, and for your commitment towards their learning and growth"

"we cannot wait to get the project going again; there is much excitement and anticipation for this collaboration"

"Having known Kenneth for one year or more, we can see his sincerity by now. The project is not about another tool. It is about curriculum reform. It is about how we can make this system a more equal one in terms of the opportunities for the students to learn"

"i think it is very interesting for teachers to look at how they interpret their learning. We can see both creation and creativity at work. Students can figure things out by themselves and it also encourages them to think hard!"

"thank you for your team's commitment and staying with our students all this while. the students have benefitted significantly from the learning and mentorship"

"we can see that student engagement definitely went up. They have a sense of ownership of their own work, product and learning. It certainly helps with their 21CC skills!"

"when we introduce the platform to the students, we let them explore on their own. It is important for us to see them become self-directed and independent learners who are willing to make mistakes"

"they are more confident, self-directed learners, and they're more willing to try and explore. They'll say, 'Wait, let me try first' and are generally more independent and they want to learn"

"for us, it has opened up new possibilities to improve our pedagogy, our curriculum, the way we deliver it and improve ourselves, basically. Otherwise, we won't know how well we're doing"

"the NIE team has been very kind to emphasise that anytime we need anything, we can approach them. And the help they provide is very prompt!"

"students sometimes have problems interpreting what their thoughts are. This platform gives them a better picture of how to explain the ideas which are more visible for the person they're trying to explain to"

"thank you, Kenneth, for providing much food for thought for our learning. You are indeed right to point us back towards thinking about how learning can be enhanced and deepened. I am glad we will still be working with your team on PD"

"I have never doubted the Six Learnings Framework based on Disciplinary Intuitions. As a school, we have seen how this programme has heightened the learning and the engagement for self-directed learning for my students."

"the lessons provoked students' thinking beyond the curriculum, such as using the sensors for other purposes in their lives, and even how to modify the sensors."

"It has been a fulfilling experience to work with learning technologists who look into the engagement from a different point of view. Learning circuits theory has been elevated to another level."

"thank you very much for delivering an amazing seminar on STEM education. our principals, teachers and guests have benefitted greatly from your experience in curriculum design and from your work with teachers from diversified backgrounds. your sharing of micro:bit applications also brought immense inspiration to the audience."

"Disciplinary Intuitions is a great way for me to explain related ideas (eg, scaffolding) to my pre-service students. You did a great job."

"Thank you, Dr. Lim, for helping us along with this exploration and sharing your time and resources with us. I also appreciated your sharing of the lessons learnt from earlier trials. I see a great learning opportunity for my students and my team and look forward to the experience."

"We are very very grateful for all the support that your teams has blessed us with. We are very fortunate to work with very good partners so that our students can benefit from the SORBET world."

"Some great conversations opened up by the game!  Students were talking about self-isolating and quarantining as well as safe distancing.  The teachers were getting them to think about how life can go on if we take these precautions.  All really good stuff. Looking forward to rest of the classes!"

"Thank you for your generosity and guidance once again. I’m looking forward to wonderful outcomes for this project in 2021."

"We found this a very useful pedagogy in facilitating authentic learning and helping students to be more 'geographically' aware of their environment. I believe this pedagogy has a lot of potential and our unit does hope to continue implementing it next year. We are really really thankful for this opportunity to work with you and your team on this project as it reminded us that the teaching of Geography should not just be about content, but should include teaching our students how to think geographically and be more geographically aware in our everyday lives. Thank you to you and your team for all the guidance and feedback as critical friends."

"Thank you for your sharing which serves as an inspiration and as a stimulating reminder of the capabilities of our students with the right setup and support."

"Very inspiring to see the quality of the students' thinking."

what students are saying:

“by terraforming, it really helps us understand the properties of a landscape”

“this is much more believable, much more impactful”

“… so the objective is to build a river system, with upper, middle and lower courses. So in order to build this you need negotiation, because some people have different views, so negotiation will take place. So this is all about collaboration, it’s not just about group work.”

“in the traditional way, there would be a lot more peer pressure, and they would not be able to perform as well”

"... and i finally learned to sculpt. Took a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot of tried but i succeeded :-) making a desk at the moment."

"it helps us imagine! For example, our textbook doesn't allow you to see the whole view of a mountain but our learning environment allows that."

"i am a visual learner so when i see things, i can depict the scenes better so it is easier to learn coordinates and gradients."

"this class promotes talking to each other, we can interact more."

"if you draw in 2D - if you're bad at drawing like me, it takes a lot of time, but in 3D you just create it, you can change the shape a bit, and move around and see the sides."

"i really enjoyed this lesson a lot. we came together to discuss what we wanted to build and we put the forms together to form a sculpture. it sparks our creativity and this makes the lesson more interesting."

"i feel that this kind of learning is more interactive in the sense that it exposes us to different kinds of media that we can play with during the art lesson."

"it was the first days of our science lessons in the school. We were surprised as our science teacher came in to the class and showed us plastic boxes. The class was excited and curious about the boxes. We wanted to try straightaway the equipment. We have a lot of fun during the lessons and we cannot wait to see how the cricket-cage and sensors work. We were amazed when we know that the sensors can record the sound of the cricket and send it right away to our mobile phone. We were busy talking about the equipment and what we can do with it."

"it was interesting how the game is played and allowed me to know more about the COVID-19 situation."

"i like the fact tha we can use this pandemic for a math project. it is out-of-the-box thinking."

"it is a visual stimulus and is more interesting than facing textbooks and worksheets."

"it's interesting and at the same time shows us how viruses spread."

"it makes the assessment not stressful."

"I had an interesting experience with the SORBET project as it was educational and engaging. SORBET taught me the importance of social distancing and how easily a virus can be spread. In SORBET, one may contract the virus by coming into contact with an infected user. This can be applied in real life to teach students how dangerous it is to be close to one another."

"Overall, I find this experience pretty enjoyable. It teaches me that social distancing reduces the chance of unknowingly infect others or being infected by others when there’s less interaction. An example of not social distancing could be about register number 25 and 31. They are close friends in school and outside school. During cycle 2, they’ve decided to find the figures together, unknowingly be infected. This shows the consequence of not social distancing with friends. Its difference is it demonstrate instead of explain. Demonstrating is one of the most important aspect of teaching since people understand it through seeing it."

"I had a very good experience with the SORBET project. It was a really fun game that i really enjoyed. One of the intresting aspects of the game is that i was able to interact with my friends in the game and the interactions would be recorded. This recording would be used in the virus part. Which is another unique part of the game. Overall i think the game was really interesting and unique because being able to interact with your friends is a very uncommon thing to see in these types of educational games. This taught me about social distancing as it showed how fast the virus can spread from one person to many others. As for real life now as covid-19 is a real virus that is also deadly, it is important that we students learn about how to prevent the spread of it."

"This project has been an exciting experience for me. We conducted activities in the virtual space with groups of participants who would get “infected” if they got too close to one another, just like in real life. This SORBET environment has been a suitable replacement of a real life setting and has allowed us to see how people would behave in their daily lives. By observing their interactions, we were able to have a better understanding of how people in society would also behave in the community. Those who are more reckless with social distancing measures ended up getting infected in the simulation and I was able to draw links to their behavior in real life too. Overall, the SORBET Project has given me a platform to better understand and be more observant of people’s behavior. The SORBET Project was an interesting and new software that I have never used before and has been a fun experience for me. It was a suitable software to act as an environment to simulate real life and for participants to play around with. We were also able to manipulate some of the settings of the SORBET environment to suit our activities. This allowed us to observe the participants’ behaviors and how they reacted to different situations. It is a very flexible and comfortable software to use. This project has also taught us how to observe our surroundings at a larger scale too. It has made me realize that these different behaviors can also be seen around us in real life. I hope that my classmates and the other participants were able to do so too, to be more wary of the people around them and their actions. I look forward to using this software again in the future for other projects."

"There were many learning opportunities which came with the SORBET Project. Since we had no experience in conducting social experiments, we had no idea what to expect. In fact, the first run of our activity failed. However, as the saying goes: “Failure is the key to success”. So, we learnt from the failure and moved on. Looking into the data we collected from the second round of the social experiment, we were able to analyse social behavior among our classmates and the reasoning behind such behaviors. The SORBET Project provides a visualization of how diseases can spread within a community, depending on different variables. This allows for players to have a deeper understanding on the importance of safe distancing. As our classmates could explore and interact with the simulation environment personally, they were able to observe how their own actions directly affected the results – the number of infected individuals. This hands-on experience also encourages players to apply information they have obtained from real life situations to the simulation and vice versa. As for me and my teammate, the project allowed us to think like researchers and gain some insight into the world of qualitative research."

The clip below was filmed by Zing Media Pte Ltd.