Lim, Kenneth Yang Teck

The diffusion of innovation is critical to societal progression. In the field of education, such diffusion takes on added significance because of the many stakeholders and accountabilities involved. This article presents the argument that efforts at diffusion which are designed from a top-down perspective are not sustainable over the long term because such a perspective does not sufficiently acknowledge the importance of tacit knowledge in the successful adoption and adaptation of innovations. Using examples drawn from the trialing and implementation of a suite of research innovations in the Singapore education system, the argument is made that tacit understandings of any given innovation are attained through dialogue and embodied practice within authentic contexts, and that these very contexts and opportunities for dialogue are precisely the affordances of Communities of Practice. The article draws some tentative conclusions about systems-level moves and strategies which might nurture the dialectic of theory, practice, and epistemology by leveraging existing social structures.

Global warming is a threat to plants. A warming of 1.5 – 2 deg C in the tropics is predicted to cause crop yield reductions in Southeast Asia and increase the risks for both heat waves and flooding. It is predicted that by around the mid-century period (2040 - 2069), the mean temperature in Singapore can increase by 2 deg C to 29.6 deg C in a Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 scenario. This temperature change can impact food crops and heat-vulnerable plants, threatening our food supply and increasing the risk of extinction of vulnerable plant species. Ipomoea Aquatica, also known as the Kangkong, is a heat-tolerant tropical vegetable in Southeast Asia and used in local dishes. To study whether this plant can grow well in global warming temperatures, we exposed the Kangkong to the predicted increase of 2 deg C for three weeks. A range of climate variables was recorded through the use of Arduino sensors and physical changes to the Kangkong plants such as the heights of the Kangkong in each set-up were also measured. By the 17th day, the Kangkong in the control set-up overtook the one in the increased temperature set-up in height.

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.

In this paper, a framework for facilitating effective and targeted planning and design of learning environments within Second Life and other similar virtual worlds and environments will be shared. A possible scenario faced by school-leaders and teachers, with respect to thinking about incorporating virtual worlds as a complementary pedagogical strategy alongside traditional classroom environments is first described and then the Six Learnings framework will then be elaborated upon, including its use discussed as a metric against which such learning interventions can be planned and subsequently evaluated.

Fitness exercises, including push-ups, are very beneficial to personal health. Many Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based fitness trainers are developed based on human pose estimation models or assisted by Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, many of them require access to a graphing processing unit (GPU) for model training or IoT sensors to deploy, less accessible for individuals. In our work, we designed and prototyped real-time mobile push-up detectors using three distinctive approaches: (1) Push-up pose classification, (2) Angle-heuristic estimation and (3) Optical flow detection. We trained our deep-learning model with over 2000 images to achieve a high accuracy for real time deployment. Models are tested on our video dataset applied data augmentation techniques to simulate real-world environmental conditions to evaluate model performance based on accuracy metrics (precision, recall, F1 score) and processing frame rate (FPS). From the results, we concluded that the angle-heuristic estimation method has the best overall performance and we analysed the reasons for the relatively poorer performance of the push-up pose classification and optical flow detection methods. All methods developed are capable of working on mobile devices without the need of GPU or IoT sensors.

This paper describes the analysis of electrodermal activity (EDA) in the context of students’ scholastic activity. Taking a multidisciplinary, citizen science and maker-centric approach, low-cost, bespoken wearables, such as a mini weather station and biometric wristband, were built. To investigate both physical health as well as stress, the instruments were first validated against research grade devices. Following this, a research experiment was created and conducted in the context of students’ scholastic activity. Data from this experiment were used to train machine learning models, which were then applied to interpret the relationships between the environment, health, and stress. It is hoped that analyses of EDA data will further strengthen the emerging model describing the intersections between local microclimate and physiological and neurological stress. The results suggest that temperature and air quality play an important role in students’ physiological well-being, thus demonstrating the feasibility of understanding the extent of the effects of various microclimatic factors. This highlights the importance of thermal comfort and air ventilation in real-life applications to improve students’ well-being. We envision our work making a significant impact by showcasing the effectiveness and feasibility of inexpensive, self-designed wearable devices for tracking microclimate and electrodermal activity (EDA). The affordability of these wearables holds promising implications for scalability and encourages crowd-sourced citizen science in the relatively unexplored domain of microclimate’s influence on well-being. Embracing citizen science can then democratize learning and expedite rapid research advancements.

This paper explores the use of escape room puzzles and instructional scaffolding in teaching novice learners about basic music theory. This study used the notion of epistemic frames in games as the basis for its experiment, combined with the use of technology-based scaffolding. We examined how effective it is to engage and motivate novice learners when they are made to mimic the role of an expert in music and solve problems using their knowledge and skills in the subject. We found positive responses from participants’ attitudes toward music theory and the ability to retain knowledge of the subject, as well as evidence which proves that games can have significant effects on motivation in the learning process.

This paper reports on the pilot study of a doctoral thesis which focuses on how the social software of the mobile internet, such as text messaging and picture messaging, is used by teenagers in the process of constructing negotiated and shared understandings of unfamiliar environments in which they find themselves. To this end, the study was constructed such that students were given opportunities to collaboratively explore and navigate unfamiliar environments using the technologies of the mobile internet, as well as to engage in debate, and use multimedia evidence recorded in the field to defend their positions both to peers in the field and in the classroom, regarding various issues of concern to these environments, with specific links being made to their studies in geography