Lim, Kenneth Yang Teck

As we reflect on the pedagogies adopted in the globally driven digital transformation due to Covid-19 pandemic, it is time for us to take stock of what we have all experienced as educators. With disrupted school attendance, teaching and learning were shifted to the online platform. Teachers devised new teaching and learning strategies to minimise disruptions in schooling and the term Home-based Learning (HBL) became popular. Such lived episodes make us recalibrate our current teaching practices with technology and rationalize and plan for the next leap as educators. How future-ready are we in gearing ourselves towards the adoption of new pedagogies in this digital transformation journey? This chapter aims to provide you the definitions of e-pedagogy and e-pedagogies used in literature and the adoption of e-pedagogy in Singapore. The rationalization of e-pedagogy for Singapore teachers and examples of e-pedagogy and classroom practices will also be covered.

Dementia is set to become a major global health challenge. Studies show that there is a significant surge in cases of adults above 40 living with dementia. This alarming increase is due to various factors and early detection of dementia can allow for proper treatment to be administered. There exist various screening methods, but all come with shortcomings, particularly, subjectivity in hand-scored tests. Digitalisation of the tools mitigates this concern but can bring about newer concerns such as feasibility. The clock drawing test is a simple pen and paper test, to differentiate normal individuals from those with cognitive impairment, such as dementia. Our project aims to enhance the use of the clock drawing test, via digitalising it and equipping it with machine learning capabilities. We aim to offer an increased potential for early detection of cognitive impairment, to overall, improve the state of dementia detection already in practice.

This paper describes an independent research study undertaken by a high school student under the mentorship of a Research Scientist at the National Institute of Education, Singapore. It explores how dialogic interactions on a given Mathematical topic, decimals, can be constrained in the remote learning platform Zoom. This research utilises Laurillard’s Conversational Framework for a small-scale intervention of two virtual learning sessions in Minecraft Education Edition, focusing on the decimal learning for primary school students. The study found that the overlapping of the immersive learning environment and remote learning platform engenders miscommunications, disorientation, and cognitive dissonance amongst both the teacher and the student, prolonging the discursive and adaptive phases in the dialogic interactions.

The recent phenomenon of maker culture has garnered the interest of educators as arguments have been advanced for the foregrounding of making in learning. Making in learning is an example of how participatory cultures of learning focus on authentic contexts outside of the formal spatial and temporal bounds of schooling. This chapter describes how a specialized school in Singapore made use of a curriculum design framework known as the Six Learnings (Lim,.Journal of Virtual Worlds Research 2:4-11, 2009) because of its origins in contexts of learning such as games and immersive environments. The authors facilitated the process and based the design and principles of the learning space to articulate key dispositions in learners through the nurturing of a culture of making. Foundational to the activity was a commitment to reconceptualizing the emphasis on routine tasks and instructions that are typically present in a formal classroom setting.

This chapter describes the lessons learnt during the initial 10 years of scaling and translating a suite of learning interventions under the collective umbrella of the Disciplinary Intuitions/Six Learnings programme. The Six Learnings curricular design framework has been used in the design and development of lesson units in several schools in a variety of subjects. The programme leverages primarily open-source tools and platforms to help teachers design canvases within which their students can express their emerging conceptual understandings. In this way, students’ thinking and intuitions—which would otherwise be largely tacit—are made visible and can be developed through dialogue with peers. Learning is, thus, more enduring as first-principle understanding is built. The chapter analyses the scaling and translation through the SCAEL frame. Through two case studies, principles for wider application to other subsequent interventions are suggested.

This chapter describes an intervention which was enacted from April 2018 to February 2019, in an orphanage in Singapore. The learning intervention comprised a coding curriculum conceptualised, designed and enacted by two high-school students, in their capacity as interns to the Lead Author. Written in the form of a narrative inquiry, the chapter describes the trajectory charted by the students as they sought to take their conceptual expertise in the Python coding language to design a scaffolded curriculum through the lens of a Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). This curriculum was enacted on a weekly basis after formal curriculum hours, with one of the orphans who was their peer in terms of age (prior to the intervention, the students were not acquainted with the orphan). The chapter thus describes the reflections and learning points about their personal ontologies of coding, and about their struggles as they appropriated the epistemologies of curriculum designer and tutor—as the three peers met each week for the better part of a year. The chapter therefore has potential takeaways for those interested in peer-based learning, non-formal after-school contexts of learning, as well as the place of coding and computational thinking in the curriculum.