Coding Lab Zaobao Feature: Must-Have 21st Century Skills - Get a Head start with Enrichment Activities from Debate to Coding

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Check us out - we are featured in today’s issue of Lianhe Zaobao, the largest Singapore-based Chinese-language newspaper!

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Translation in English: The Ministry of Education is pushing for holistic education among the students in recent years. Students are not only expected to grasp the academic knowledge from their school curriculum but also master the 21st Century Competencies which include critical thinking, communication skills and the spirit of teamwork. Lianhe Zaobao observed that there is an increasing trend in education service providers targeting these skills through debate and coding courses to nurture students’ soft skills. For example, The Global Citizen, which was established in 2015, aims to provide students with experimental learning and varied extra-curricular activities. The company helps the students grow through different activities like Debate, Model United Nations, Public Speaking, Global Citizenship education and leadership training.  Founders Jared Yeo and Walter Yeo feel that learning should nurture students’ worldview and critical thinking, and not just be confined to books. They observed that most young people today lack the ability to understand the importance of their role in the society and the world. Hence, the company wishes to stimulate the students’ interest in local and international development topics and affairs, in order to be a responsible global citizen. Coding Lab nurtures and develops students in their computational thinking. During the interview, the founder, Foo Yong Ning, talked about the four pillars of computational thinking - problem decomposition, abstraction, algorithm and pattern recognition. Lessons at Coding Lab cater to students from four years old to 18 years old. Coding Lab has collaborated with the National Library Board (NLB) to organise workshops for pre-schoolers, groomed primary school students to gain tech-know-hows with Scratch, and allowed secondary school students and tertiary students to combine Mathematics knowledge with Python. When discussing how the company’s classes can help students grasp the 21st century competencies, founders of The Global Citizen used debate as an example and pointed out that debate helps students to improve their communication and expression skills, training them to think logically, observe their surroundings and analyze the problem before expressing their own views. For Coding Lab, Yong Ning talked about how students are able to apply computational thinking to solve problems. He elaborated, “Our students are interacting with apps every day so when we teach them how to create games and apps, we are providing them with tools for them to tackle the future.” An administrative executive, 38, who is a mother of two, places her two sons at Coding Lab to learn to code. During the interview, she said that the coding lessons can stimulate the children’s creative thinking and encourages them to think out of the box. She added, “Attending coding classes can allow children to relax because they do not need to worry about tests or examinations and can express their creativity freely.” One of the sons from Wellington Primary School started to attend coding lessons this year and has already mastered the creation of games such as Flappy Bird. He said, “Through the coding classes, I understand the mechanics of programming like how to move and interact and broadcast messages.”