Migrant workers have played an important role in Singapore’s progress: they’ve built our homes, cleaned our streets, served in our factories and taken care of our children. Despite these contributions, migrant workers face many problems and stigmatisation. In collaboration with SDI Academy, a Social Hackathon was organised from 8-10 December 2017, to tap the resourcefulness and creativity of NTU students to devise solutions. The key themes of the Hackathon were:

  • Re-imagining Education
  • Effective Outreach
  • Social Inclusion

The Highlights

The Hackathon Challenge began with an interactive session between SDI Academy’s Management team, who introduced the landscape of migrant workers in Singapore. It was then followed by two very interesting and informative sessions on, “Computational Thinking by Gues” by speaker, Roderick Chia and “The Art of Storytelling” by famous story-teller Kamini Ramachandran.

Through these new found perspectives and skills to ideate effective solutions, the three participating teams had a very good and in-depth understanding of the problems faced by migrant workers.

Teams came up with innovative ideas to tackle these problems over two days (8-9 December 2017) and presented their findings to the panel on final Demo Day (10 December 2017). On the second day of the Hackathon Challenge, participants also enjoyed a relaxing barbeque session with the migrant workers who were invited by SDI Academy. The interaction between migrant workers and participants also helped to clear any questions that the teams faced during their thought-process.

The ideas generated during the Hackathon Challenge ranged from launching blended offfline and online English learning, to overcoming the problem of language barrier in creating social emotional learning opportunities in Ministry of Education (MOE) schools. The ideas were met with much enthusiasm by SDI Academy and their team members. In addition, the ideas generated are currently under deliberation, and SDI Academy will be finding ways in which these solutions can be implemented on the ground.

The Memories

Having fun at the barbeque session.
Participants of the Hackathon Challenge listening attentively to the presented case.
A group discussion in progress.
Teams presenting their ideas to the judging panel on Demo Day.
Judges having an open discussion with the participants.

Reflection #1 – The Challenges

Get sustained engagement from participants during the duration of the Hackathon Challenge.

The Hackathon Challenge took place over three days and at different locations in Singapore (including a park near the dormitories of migrant workers, and SDI Academy Headquarters at Mapletree Business Centre). Due the programme length and multiple locations, participation varied across the different days of the Hackathon Challenge.

 

Reflection #2 – The Takeaways

Hackathon Challenge should be conducted with a maximum duration of one day.

This will help to ensure participation and engagement throughout the duration of the program, without people filtering in and out, which creates some logistical and coordination issues.