If you have seen our Camps page at operationeinstein.wixsite.com/einstein/camps, you'll immediately notice that we highlight our four existing themed electives at the very top of the page.
Clicking on each of the four buttons will lead you to detailed descriptions for each elective. For example, when you click on "Reap what you Sow", you'll be sent down the page where we explain that this elective on food science is structured according to a full meal.
In this elective, campers will progressively explore modules on beverages such as bubble tea, appetizers that involve molecular gastronomy, and desserts such as ice cream and rock candy.
But sharp-eyed readers may also notice an anchor menu at the side of the page. Clicking on the bottom dot of the anchor menu or simply scrolling all the way down the page will lead you to a mysterious section titled "Loading ... Pls Wait".
We would like to assure you that this is not an error or outdated page!
Loading ...
When you click on the bottom dot in the anchor menu on the left side of the screen, you'll be directed to the section shown in the screenshot above. Here, you'll see four brand new electives that we've been putting a lot of work into!
In a future post, we'll touch on "Meds & Health" and "Lights Camera Action", but for today's post, we'll focus on sharing more about our electives on coding and electronics.
Singapore's Coding Movement
In July 2019, Singapore's Ministry of Education (MOE) announced that the Code for Fun program will be offered as a 10 hour enrichment program for all upper primary school students.
However, then-Education Minister Ong Ye Kung smartly ruled out making coding compulsory, and described the idea as “too simplistic”.
He added: "Not everyone will grow up to be a coder. Many of us, we just need to learn to use technology and software and be comfortable with using them. Further, the programming languages will become outdated by the time the students graduate."In the same article, Mr Ong subtly put forth his own vision for the use of educational technology.
Here's what he said: "What we want to do is to use the Student Learning Space (SLS) to enhance the classroom experience. Let the technology fade into the background. Let the interaction, the discussion and the thinking come to the fore. Flip the classroom, give students more voice, make learning become collaborative. Then students are more likely to internalise the lessons, and achieve better education outcomes."Lastly, he also reflected on MOE's pilot study on using personal learning devices in secondary school. Interestingly, he mentioned that "teachers cannot teach the traditional way using e-learning" and need new "e-pedagogies", without specifying what these are.
But most critically, he said there needs to be device usage control, so learning devices can "access educationally meaningful sites on the Internet". He believed this was "consistent with a common school practice where no mobile phone usage is allowed during school hours".
Allow me to share my thoughts on Mr Ong's rather interesting and insightful comments
Device Usage Control
From what I understand, it's not uncommon for parents to set restrictions on their kids' mobile devices. After all, no parent wants their lovely child to become addicted to mobile games, social media, or worse, encounter non-PG material online.
But if you've not been busy staring at your own smartphone while riding the MRT or public bus, you might notice that maybe kids are now literally being fed their parents' phones and tablets!
These kids grow up watching YouTube kids and Disney while travelling, and I'm not surprised if they continue binging on TV and Games at home.
I was born in 2001, and can be considered as part of what has been termed "iGen", or the generation that grew up with iPhones. But I often feel like part of an older generation when compared to my younger peers.
When I was about to take my A-Levels in 2019, I learnt from some of my juniors that RI had introduced a ban on mobile devices for lower secondary students. At the start of every day, the form teacher of each class would make all the students hand over their phones, and then lock the phones up in the teacher's cupboard.
The reason: students were getting too distracted by their mobile phones and not properly paying attention in class.
I was honestly quite shocked. When I was a secondary school student just a couple of years earlier, there was no restriction on mobile phone usage. And it was certainly unthinkable then that our phones would be confiscated to prevent us from using them.
After all, the RI school management had just began a pivot towards digital learning. My own teachers rapidly embraced all sorts of platforms and apps like Kahoot, Quizlet, and Nearpod.
In fact, my class was often allowed to use our phones at any point during lessons without needing to ask for permission. We could check online dictionaries, read news, search for interesting articles, and basically do whatever we wanted.
This system was based on trust, but it seems like the trust has been destroyed. The same school management which encouraged my batch to use our phones in class for learning, has now banned them.
And from what Mr Ong has said, it seems like this ban is now a national policy ...
Our Einstein Experience
It's easy to point fingers at poor parenting for students becoming addicted to their devices to the point that schools have to take such drastic action. But perhaps we need to acknowledge that given the proliferation of technology today, such problems are rather inevitable.
My OT learnt this the hard way.
In 2019, we pioneered the launch of Operation Einstein's STEM Camps. Held in the June School Holidays in conjunction with our community partners North-East CDC and CDAC, we structured our camps around our four main electives which are prominently featured under our Camps page.
While our STEM camps were warmly received by our campers, and even featured in Lianhe Zaobao, we actually struggled in delivering some parts of our electives.
When planning our camp activities and pedagogy, we tried to incorporate technology into our programs. We made sure to use PHET simulations when we were unable to showcase certain phenomena in real life, and provided relevant digital equipment like dataloggers to track sound waves for Emmanuel's elective, "Sounds like Fun".
For more own elective, "Ball is Life", I tried to teach essential but somewhat dry concepts like Newton's Laws and projectile motion through phone games which I really enjoyed when I was younger.
One of my favorite games in secondary school was a two-player game called Bump Sheep. Every morning, my classmates and I would take turns to play against each other and try to make our sheep shove their way over to the other side.
As you can see from the screenshot from an actual Bump Sheep game that I played, the bigger the sheep, the more shoving power it has!
I felt this was a pretty fun and intuitive way to teach the fundamental concepts of net forces and equilibrium, so I created a short investigation handout where each buddy pair of 1 volunteer and 1 camper would play Bump Sheep and explore these concepts!
The actual investigation handout used during our camps is shown below:
Thankfully, Bump Sheep turned out to be an immense success, and both our campers and volunteers really loved learning about forces through the game.
Sadly, our other experiment with educational technology through more conventional like PHET simulations failed epically.
To give an introduction to projectile motion so campers would have a better idea how to build and launch their own PET rocket, I relied on PHET simulations where campers had to fire a cannon at a castle.
The key learning point was that launching the cannon at different angles would affect the distance and height of the cannonball. It was meant to be a simple activity, but all hell broke loose once we brought out the laptops and connected them to Wi-Fi.
The moment we opened Google Chrome and clicked on the PHET simulation, the campers immediately began trying to access YouTube. We tried to get them to focus on the activity, but they wouldn't even listen to their own volunteer buddies.
In their own little minds, they equated devices with games and videos. Bump Sheep worked because it was a really fun game, and it was designed to just be a game. Its creators might have relied on some math concepts, but it certainly wasn't designed to teach Physics. It just happened that I had Bump Sheep on my phone because I used to play it, and decided to create my own investigation based on it.
In contrast, many of these online learning software are designed primarily for learning and not gaming. As much effort as their creators put into them, they will have limited attractiveness and learning efficacy for kids who have an idea that internet = game time.
Young Coders@North East
If you're unfamiliar with our STEM camps, you might be wondering how a student-run non-profit got access to so many phones and laptops for their campers to play with.
What actually happened was that we got our volunteers to download the necessary games and resources on their own phones beforehand and share their phones with their buddies. As for the laptops, each CDAC center already has its own stash of laptops for its own coding programs.
Even though we didn't have to pay for these devices, our STEM camps are not free. This is starkly different from our other programs, namely small group sessions and science carnivals, which are 100% free with no attached terms and conditions.
Beyond the cost of lunch and snacks, we have to purchase quite a lot of materials in order to provide our campers with the best possible experience for each elective.
For example, "Reap What You Sow" is an elective on food science, and we have many hands-on activities like Molecular Gastronomy and Ice-Cream making. We need to purchase new ingredients for each camp, so the total cost of materials for all our electives is around $10/camper.
When we partnered with North-East CDC and CDAC, our camps were funded by a STEM initiative called Young Coders@North East.
As you can see from this poster we found online, this initiative was designed to teach basic coding skills to low-income primary school students in the North East District.
So our camps were actually three days long.
Operation Einstein was in charge of the first two days, where we guided the campers in discovering a love for science and learning outside the classroom through our various electives.
On the third day, an external partner was engaged by North-East CDC to teach coding through an educational program called Scratch. They claimed that campers would be able to create their "own games and animated stories in just 6 hours".
Because Scratch requires laptops with a stable internet connection, we were able to utilize these laptops for our own electives for the first two days. But after our camps, we were left wondering how much attention the campers actually paid during the Scratch lessons.
Many of the campers seemed to have little knowledge about the Scratch software, and apparently spent most of the lessons just blindly following instructions to drag and drop various coding blocks to create a pre-programmed software.
Frankly, I'm a bit of a cynic when it comes to these coding programs by external partners that like to promise the moon, and I'm not surprised if our campers used the laptops to watch Frozen music videos instead.
Beyond Reactive Measures
We seem to have landed ourselves in a rather comical situation. We want students who've grown up with technology to learn more about technology, but they're so used to playing with technology that they won't use technology for "educational purposes".
The easy way to solve this problem is what RI and MOE is now trying to do. Ban phones and smart devices, and instead offer each student a rudimentary micro:bit device.
In 2017, it was announced that the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) will work with MOE to "pocket-sized, codeable computer in the palms of up to 100,000 school-going children and adults to instill passion for technology to better prepare for a digital future."
Let's examine this claim objectively. According to media reports, the micro:bit "contains a programmable array of LED lights, sensors, a Bluetooth chip and a meter that measures magnetic fields".
As you can see from the Straits Time video below, MCI proudly showed off a windmill and teamaker made with the micro:bit in an attempt to showcase its capabilities.
I'll compliment the windmill and tea maker on their aesthetics, but I seriously doubt many kids see the point in making a tea maker. Especially when it takes more effort to tie the teabag onto the structure instead of just putting it in the cup.
Is this small device really going to be one key pillar of our nationally funded STEM education programs. Is it really going to "instill passion for technology" when put in the hands of kids who have a smartphone in their pockets that I'm sure they very much prefer to the micro:bit.
If the micro:bit's purpose is to introduce technology without distracting students, I think it's achieved its goal. Because it's so boring (and its functionality so non-existent) that only the most hardcore STEM enthusiasts would go and fiddle with it.
My Own Compulsory STEM Education Experience
In Secondary 1 and 2, two of my compulsory classes in RI were Computer Studies and Design Thinking. The curriculum and learning goals were honestly rather ambitious.
In Secondary 1, I was taught how to edit photos and design my own logo in Adobe Photoshop. In Secondary 2, I learnt how to create my own website in Adobe Dreamweaver and became an expert in HTML. I used to these skills to create this very website for Operation Einstein that you're viewing today, operationeinstein.wixsite.com/einstein.
Sounds like a success story right? Well, all of that is utter bulls**t.
Like our dear campers from CDAC, I got bored of Photoshop within two lessons. Most of our lessons involved our teacher giving us a mini-task and providing us with a series of steps to follow to complete the task.
It sounds pretty decent, but I don't really think that anyone in my class really found tasks like editing online stock photos exciting. We might have cared if we could upload photos from our own phones into Photoshop, make some sick edits, and then post them on our own spam accounts. But that wasn't the case, so most lessons were spent on online gaming or YouTube.
In Secondary 2, the same teacher tried to teach us how to create our own websites in Dreamweaver. The step-by-step instructions this time were from an reputed online provider called w3schools.com that touts itself as "The World's Largest Web Developer Site".
This is a screenshot of the w3schools.com HTML tutorial that I took while writing this post. It definitely looks better than when I was in secondary school, but I don't think anything about this site really makes me want to try it out.
Most of us found it really challenging and boring, so we simply gave up and created an absolutely nonsense website on Dreamweaver.
I think you get my point. A lot of these so-called subject experts who are promoting coding and STEM don't seem to remember that they were once students themselves. Their offerings are often either too abstract and complex, or too lame and boring.
Just take a look at this ridiculous bragging from Meridian Primary School's website that I found while researching on STEM education.
I don't mean to single out any particular school or teacher, but surely Meridian's ICT Department should know that a one-off workshop will not equip students "to be future ready digital citizens in Singapore's Smart Nation".
I honestly have no idea what being a future-ready digital citizen even means.
When the Einstein OTs were coming together to discuss whether we should embark on a coding elective for our STEM Camps, one concern raised was that the market was already so saturated with coding programs.
While some of us have coding experience and expertise, it didn't really make sense to invest so much time and effort into developing coding electives with these various national programs run by ICT teachers who are far better trained than us.
But when we started our research, we often see phrases similar to that found on Meridian's website. They'll promise to make kids the next Steve Jobs, when most of their programs are empty shells protected by a smokescreen of deception.
The Root Problem
I can't speak for everyone, or even a majority of students, but I think one of the biggest reasons why so many of us hated computer studies was that we really couldn't see the purpose of learning the prescribed curriculum.
For the many current students who are now being "forced" into coding exposure programs, I doubt they can actually see the practical application in what they do, beyond some IT fair project that they have to present and subsequently forget about.
I decided to write about coding and electronics for this blog post even though I'm not involved in working on these electives because my experiences with creating this website for Operation Einstein has changed my perspective.
While I took triple science in Secondary School, I appealed to take a hybrid subject combination in Junior College. I'm interested in STEM, but my real passion is the intersection between education, social work, urban studies, and architectural design.
In a future blog post, I may follow Simon's blog post in elaborating on how these interests led me to join Operation Einstein. But for now, I really want to share my process of creating this site.
I first learnt that Shira and Yifan from OT4 were working on creating a website for Operation Einstein late last year. So when I was on block leave in early Jan, I decided to check out the site and realized it had been built with Wix ADI as a trial.
Because of my interest in design, I switched the platform to Wix Editor (which is far more functional) and built most of the current site in about a week. Prior to this, I had no interest in website or web design, and my only experience was screwing around with Dreamweaver in Secondary 2 which I described earlier.
I've never been particularly drawn to coding because as a visual person I find it hard to understand and write my own code, but Wix allowed me to utilize drag-and-drop strips to focus on the UX functionality and design of this site.
While working on this website, I even learnt some HTML basics which I really dreaded back then. I needed to embed our Google Forms for community partners and volunteers in our respective Engage Us and Volunteer pages, and HTML was the only way to do it.
I was driven to complete this site not because I suddenly became interested in coding or web design, but because I saw the vitally important purpose of this site which I've described in an earlier post.
And that's the approach that Operation Einstein is bringing to our new Coding and Electronics electives!
Highlights from Coding & Electronics Electives
While we're still finalizing the details of these electives, we'll like to share one activity that we're really excited about!
We believe this activity draws on what we've learnt from our past STEM camps, because it is fundamentally designed as a game that kids and adults alike will love and enjoy!
Moreover, the game is designed with a clear purpose. Its learning objectives are designed into the game, and we hope campers will be motivated to learn these concepts (like how they learnt about forces in Bump Sheep) because they can help win the game!
This game is none under than Potato Pirates! Designed in Singapore by former SUTD students, Potato Pirates is an exemplary model of how to resolve the irony of students being distracted by technology while learning about it.
Rather than trying to reduce distractions by providing rudimentary technology like what MOE is trying to do with the micro:bit, Potato Pirates provides the full learning experience without compromising any sort of fun. Check out the amazing video below to understand more!
If you want to try out Potato Pirates for yourself, you can easily purchase it even with COVID-19 because Potato Pirates is a Singapore company.
What Operation Einstein aims to provide through our coding elective is the integration of various aspects of Potato Pirates within our larger curriculum. Potato Pirates alone will not enable you to code your own website, because its focus is more on computational logic and confidence.
So what we can offer is a hybrid of Potato Pirates and the conventional step-by-step instructional method to provide a unique and meaningful learning experience.
Steps are important to handhold and guide our campers, but we'll use the concepts learnt in Potato Pirates to intuitively explain what each step means, and why these steps are arranged in a particular order!
Our coding and electronics camps are still in a work in progress, and because of COVID-19, we've yet to test these programs on any kids. But if you like what you've read so far and you're interested in finding out more about the camp structure and hands-on activities, you can easily contact us or engage our services today!
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