Students Today, Digital Natives of the Future | campus.sg

by Lydia Tan

In this day and age, where everything is becoming digitalised, e-learning is the future of education. Schools are slowly implementing e-learning programmes and computing lessons for their students; companies and agencies are also realising the need to educate their staff on how to be more tech-savvy. So what’s actually being done here in Singapore?

Programming made easy

Tech giants like Apple are stepping up with programmes to teach concepts like coding and programming to the masses. Recently, the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and RMIT Online announced they’ll be launching app development courses for adult learners, supported by SkillsFuture Singapore.

The curriculum makes use of Apple’s programming language system, Swift. One of its key features is Swift Playgrounds, which allows students to create small programmes called “playgrounds”, using code to see immediate results.

Putting the ‘e’ in Education

The Ministry of Education has also rolled out some digital programmes for students in the recent years. For example, the Code for Fun Enrichment Programme, offered to all MOE primary and secondary schools, gives students a basic understanding of coding and computational thinking concepts and how to apply them to real life.

Another system put in place by the MOE is the Singapore System Learning Space (SLS), an online learning portal that promotes self-directed learning and peer collaborative learning that teachers can give feedback on. Students can revisit concepts and content that they learned during lessons and go through them at their own pace.

Power to the disadvantaged

When it comes to digital education for the masses, we cannot neglect those among us who have special needs. Thus, it is important to make ICT learning opportunities more open to students with special needs from an early age, so they can upskill themselves, be more independent and increase their chances of employment in society later on. People with autism have also been shown to have a natural interest in and ability to with IT, demonstrating that everyone can benefit from being IT literate.

Special needs schools like Pathlight School, Singapore’s first autism-focused school, are starting to expose their students to digital learning. They will be offering its secondary students Apple’s Swift Accelerator programme, a 144-hour programme for students aged 13-18 supported by the IMDA, which is available to all schools.

Pathlight also launched an IT & Design Academy in 2013 to equip their students with the relevant ICT skills in areas such as coding, design and digital media, from as young as Primary 1.

Young entrepreneurs

The youth in Singapore are also starting to gain interest in coding and programming from an early age and some have already tried their hands at developing their own apps and programmes.

One of these young entrepreneurs is polytechnic student Dalton Ng, who has been making mobile apps for 5 years and is a scholar from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference last year. His latest app, Master, was developed with his fellow student digital entrepreneurs which aims to make studying more efficient and effective by merging psychology and machine learning. The app is still in its beta phase, with over 400 signups.

Another young startup, Codomo, consists of a team of SUTD graduates – they focus on incorporating design thinking into education in a fun, engaging way. The team developed a card game called Potato Pirates, which teaches kids computational thinking and programming concepts without all the jargon and syntax. It’s an innovative way to merge the real world with the tech world.

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There’s no escaping the fact that going digital is the future, so we need to ensure that we’re keeping up with this rapid advancement. While Singapore is working towards making our society more digitally literate, there’s still so much more we can do for ICT education so that Singapore can truly become that Smart Nation we’re working towards.