Education

Future education in Singapore

By Alice Kok | 9 October 2008

With the advent of Singapore’s FutureSchools project—whereby the next generation of students will be equipped with ICT in every area of their studies—we interview a leading secondary school in the country to get an insight to these students’ lifestyles come the invasion of technology into classrooms.

We speak to Chung Wen Chee Deputy Principal of Hwa Chong Institute to gain this insight.

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• FEATURE

A Week in the Life of a Future School Student in Hwa Chong

Tan Wei Guo is your typical Sec 4 student in the FutureSchool@HwaChong. Bookmarked on his notebook is the Hwa Chong Nexus (HCnX), the web 2.5 version of our Intelligent School Portal, where students blog, create community groups and access academic notes and assignments. Wei Guo decides the main applications on his personal space.

Wei Guo is also in the Science and Math Talent Programme (SMTP). He conducts joint-research in environmental-evolutionary science, ethno-botany, physics, and mathematics – what the adults call “multidisciplinary” – with students from the Loudoun County Public Schools Academy of Sciences in Virginia, USA.

His project involves recording the songs of crickets from temperate and tropical climate to map the differences in wave patterns when the crickets are exposed to various conditions. Together with David Smith from the Academy, they are exploring the possibility of altering the songs to increase the crickets’ reproductive rate so as to increase their biomass for use as fish food. For this, they rely on expert help from the renowned Khao Sok National Park in Southern Thailand.

The classrooms are called home rooms, where Wei Guo is placed amongst the independent learners. Here, learning involves many different individual and collaborative activities where ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ interactions coexist. In the virtual learning community, Wei Guo’s mentor is a Hwa Chong alumnus who majored in entomology at the University of Western Australia. Both are members of the Western Australian Insect Study Society.

Wei Guo retrieves learning resources online from Stanford University’s Education Program for Gifted Youth. Apart from his home teacher, he is tutored by Mr. Lam in Penang and he talks to his Physics tutor using video conferencing. Such three-way tutorials allow him to exchange ideas and learn.

Lessons-wise, Wei Guo learns Chinese through network gaming, Geography by going on virtual fieldtrip (3-D), understands DNA structure through virtual reality, and applies Mathematics with the use of tablet PC. Every week, he engages in online discussions with friends in the Beijing satellite campus. This week’s discussion focuses on the election outcome in Taiwan.

For Wei Guo, 20 per cent of his time in school consists of online lessons, 40 on tutorials, 20 on lectures, and 20 per cent on project-research. His favourite subjects are those non-examinable modules that train him to think critically and independently. Besides mastering established corpuses of knowledge, he also engages in activities like research, sport and community service, and interacts with his seniors and works collaboratively in teams.

Tonight, he has a video conference with his fellow schoolmates in Beijing. There is never a dull moment at Hwa Chong! Learning takes place anytime, anywhere.