Lim, Kenneth Yang Teck

This paper describes an intervention piloted in secondary schools in Singapore in the second half of 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The intervention aims to afford learners more authentic understandings of the need to invest effort and self-discipline in nurturing the new habit of practicing safe-distancing, beyond just doing so because of public exhortation. It seeks to achieve this objective through two complementary halves, the first being an activity within a virtual environment during which a (virtual) virus is diffusing, and the second being dialogue and discussion around students’ decision-making and behaviours, as informed from an analysis of data of interaction from the first half, via a web-based interface. In this way, the Socially Responsible Behaviour through Embodied Thinking (SORBET) Project represents not only an intervention designed to meet the challenges to learning imposed by COVID-19, but also one of the current few which attempt to do so by leveraging students’ evolving conceptions about the diffusion of a virus amongst a population. Understood thusly, the intervention has potential curricular applications in a number of disciplinary domains, such as in mathematics, geography, biology and citizenship education.

Recent developments in handheld telephony have given rise to the ‘mobile internet' - a range of technologies, from multimedia-messaging to access of the internet through handheld devices. These trends have been accompanied by the increasing consumerization of the mobile phone. Many students today have access to a tool, which allows them to connect to potentially anyone else, regardless of spatial co-location. This paper describes a study which was carried out in the early months of 2004, focusing on how the social software of the mobile internet, such as text- and picture-messaging, is used by adolescents in the process of constructing negotiated and shared understandings of unfamiliar environments in which they may find themselves. Students were presented with opportunities to collaboratively explore and navigate unfamiliar environments using the technologies of the mobile internet, as well as to engage in debate, and used multimedia evidence recorded in the field to defend their positions both to peers in the field and subsequently in the classroom.

This article provides an overview of research in the Learning Sciences from a Design Research perspective, as it has been framed in Singapore by the National Institute of Education (NIE). The initial research agenda is considered in the light of challenges and the subsequent re-casting of objectives, based on the working out of a tripartite relationship between the NIE, the Ministry of Education, and local schools. A conceptual model is proposed as an attempt to provide structure for new research interventions going forward.

In view of the mental health issues among adolescents in Singapore, aromatherapy is proposed to mitigate their stress level when studying. An experiment was conducted both in the classroom and home setting, to test the effectiveness of the give odours, lavender, rosemary, ylang-ylang, lemon and bergamot on reducing stress level, using the no odour scenario as control. Objective data (SpO2, heart rate and stress score) is collected using the HUAWEI Band 6 smartwatch. Subjective data was self-reported by the participants through Google forms, rating their emotional health on a 10-point scale and elaborating in prose. It was found that the anti-anxiety effects of the stimulants (lemon, bergamot, rosemary) were much larger than that of the sedatives (lavender, ylang-ylang). In particular, lemon showed the best objective anxiolytic effect, while bergamot was the best in terms of self-perceived effect. Rosemary relieved stress through raising productivity, but some effects of overworking were observed. On the other hand, ylang-ylang showed inconsistent effects, while lavender was not suitable to relieve stress when studying.

This project describes the trialling of a new form of cooperative learning strategy, in the form of a game known as EcoRangers. EcoRangers is a multi-player game, designed to run on handphones, written specifically for education. EcoRangers is one of the first, if not the world’s first, instances of this totally new genre of pedagogical tools (ie, collaborative handheld educational games). In its current iteration, EcoRangers is designed to help pupils practise skills of relevance to the Upper Secondary Social Studies syllabus, specifically through the pedagogical strategy known as the Structured Academic Controversy, in which learners debate an open-ended problem from a variety of perspectives. The trialling was done in Fuchun Secondary School, among twenty Secondary Three pupils from the Express stream. These pupils were taken through two distinct fieldwork tasks in March and April 2004, with the game being introduced as part of a post-fieldwork activity.

This paper describes the results of a study involving about a hundred adolescents from various Secondary Schools in Singapore in 2004. Subjects were tasked with two complementary tasks in the field, and they worked in pairs to navigate a given route, and also to subsequently engage in a debate about an issue pertaining to the same neighbourhood, using text - and picture-messaging technologies. The paper references an earlier pilot study carried out that same year with a separate, smaller, group of students. The results of the study are analysed with a view to informing more effective classroom practice, specifically when teaching map-reading, and, more generally, in collaborative learning environments as a whole.