This ideathon consists of 3 different problem statements from 3 different organisations, and we were grouped into FaithActs, who primarily worked with children. We got to volunteer with them to engage the children at their student care centre in Queenstown. Through this volunteering session, I personally observed a higher percentage of the Silver generation in that area, other than discovering the needs of the young children there. Since FaithActs was partnering with SG Cares VC@Queenstown, we were assigned a problem statement by them to engage the elderly there by finding ways in which the centre can work with the NUS students. The following week, we had a mentoring session with the organisations, which allowed us to consider factors to include in our pitch, such as the feasibility, cost and the substantiation of our ideas.

Our pitch consisted of 2 different ideas; which served to engage the elderly for a sustained period of time. Through this process, it allowed me to stop seeing issues like these in a myopic point of view and feel assured that even people as young as me could make a difference in the society too. It was a really worthwhile experience, trying to think of several rationales and considerations of our strategies. Overall, this experience was indeed a fulfilling to my group members and I, and we felt honoured to be able to have this platform to share our solutions on real problems like these. 

There was a slight difference with this competition and the previous Sparkseed competition, as the judging criteria required us to utilise a psychology framework to prove the effectiveness of our strategy. The duration of the pitch was also longer, from 8 minutes to 15 minutes, which had placed a bit more of pressure on us. However, with the workshops by Ms Kek Chee Hui, a lecturer at TP's centre for Applied Behavioural Sciences and Ms Sharmain Chin, the co-founder of Total Wellness Initiative Singapore (TWIS), managed to empower us to take a more holistic and preventive approach to care for their personal wellness using different wellness frameworks like Cost-Benefit analysis, SWOT analysis, Theory of Change and PICO analysis. I decided to instill the Theory of Change in our strategy as there were a myriad of micro goals that added up to the achievement of our main goal -- the problem statement. We also had to think out of the box; how to measure our outcomes and made a mental note that reasonable timeframes such as long term courses may help encourage larger changes.

Our proposal consisted of a Talent Exploration Programme, tied together with an Inter-Skills Day which would take place thrice a year. We aimed to help students to see the importance of pursuing their non-academic interests and commit to them. Another end goal was for both teachers and parents to be able to recognise that students are strongly encouraged to strive for their diverse abilities and contributions to the society. On top of that, we had to consider the main assumptions and the validity of these assumptions.

More pictures of the Pyschathon!

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