Executive summary

Organization background:

Science center Singapore was opened on 10 Dec 1977 by Dr Toh. Science center aims to promote interest, learning and creativity in science and technology, through imaginative and enjoyable experiences, contributing to the development of Singapore’s human resource. Science center make science accessible and engaging, creating an environment where Singaporeans are empowered to advance their own learning and, hopefully, are inspired to do something incredible with their futures.

Project background info:

I was involved in two projects during my one month in Science center. The first project i was involved in was educating both students and teachers on how to use the Young Scientist website. We had to create tutorial videos to teach students and teachers how to access the website, as well as how students can submit their assignments and how teachers are able to grade students assignments on the website. This project aims to help non tech savvy teachers or students to learn how to use the website. For my second project, we had to come up with tasks for students to complete to earn the Young Scientist for a sustainable development badge. The track was created in light of the UN sustainable development goals and the project aims to educate students on sustainable development as well as how they can play a role in their everyday lives in helping every nation achieve the SDGs. Students had to complete 15 trophies worth of tasks in order to earn the badge. Each tasks can vary from 1 trophy to trophy, depending on the level of difficulty of the tasks.

Elaboration of how the work is done:

For the creating of the videos, we first had to to familiarize ourselves with the young scientist project, its website and the software the program ran on. Initially, it was quite tough to put pieces of information together, since it was our first time seeing the programs and websites. However, after a little bit of time, we managed to understand how everything worked and how users use the platform. We were then tasked with creating a few short instructional videos about how teachers specifically could use the website. For the creation of the videos, we made use of a software called Powtoon. Although we initially had little to no issues at all while doing our first draft, we hit quite a roadblock once we had received comments about how our videos were lacking clips to really direct those who might have issues. For eg, in our first draft, our videos did not include screen recordings of how the website could be used and was more of an instructional video. But thankfully, we managed to figure out how to add screen recordings into our videos, which will better help teachers and students to learn how to use the website.

For our second project, we had to go online and learn more about sustainable development as well as understand the UN sustainable development goals, specifically goal 7,11 and 12. Then, we had to come up with 60 different tasks for the 3 tracks. The tasks varied from one star to three stars, with the number of stars representing the level of difficulty. The biggest challenge we faced was the young scientist website being down on the first day. As we could not access the site and look at the other courses that were already there, we had to come up with the questions and gauge how many stars each task is worth on our own. Initially, we were only supposed to come up with 20 tasks. However, after our first draft, our mentors decided that we should come up with 60 in total, with 20 tasks each for a certain age category. This is such that students will enjoy a more targeted learning experience, and will stand to benefit more from this scheme. Our mentors also guided us by providing us some examples of what types of tasks suits the different level of difficulty.

3 Content knowledge or skills learnt

1. Learning how to use an open source platform. Being able to use an open source platform allows me to create a platform that is easily accessible by everyone. Such a platform is easy for everybody to learn and thus benefits many.

2. I learnt how to create interesting videos that will draw the attention of the audience, but at the same time ensure that the video is educational. I had to make sure some parts of the video were not too long so that we wont end up boring the audience.

3. I learnt how to source for information that is simple to understand. This was especially important as we had to create courses for different age groups, and i could not give students of a lower age group the same resources and information i provide for the older age group

2 interesting aspects of my learning

1. Being able to learn and understand the user experience more thoroughly

2. Our mentors had a very hands off approach of learning. Each time we start on a new project, the mentors will first give us one or two days to explore websites, software and to research about the topic of the project on our own. They believed that by letting us explore around software, for eg. powtoon, it would better allow us to understand how the software works and create a more intriguing video.

1 life takeaway

The 1 life takeaway that i have from this one month experience would definitely be the work ethic of my mentors. During their work, they would give their best and go all out, no matter how tiring or tedious the task is.