voyeurism

Maker Motes: inaugural geography class in Singapore - students siting

last week, i shared about the very first geography learning unit in a regular Singapore school is taking place.

in that post, i described how the geography teachers took responsibility for the facilitation of the lesson in which the students coded the Maker Motes.

this past Monday, the lesson continued as a field-based activity, in which the students assembled the Maker Motes and placed them around the school campus, at locations decided upon by themselves.

to witness this learning unit unfolding has bee a true privilege.

Maker Motes: sharing with landscape architecture students from Thammasat University

we are very grateful to Prof Kim Irvine of the Humanities & Social Studies Education Academic Group of the National Institute of Education (NIE) for his invitation to interact with a visiting delegation of undergraduates from the faculty of Architecture and Planning, Thammasat University, Thailand.

here's a pic of our visit to the NIE raingarden :-)

Maker Motes: inaugural geography class conducted by teachers in a school in Singapore!

we've been working towards this for more than five years, and today our dream of a geography lesson designed and conducted by teachers themselves, in an authentic secondary school setting in Singapore finally came to fruition.

the lesson was conducted under the auspices of our partnership with a small inter-divisional team from the Ministry of Education, for which we are very grateful.

i would like to thank all the members of my team who have persevered over so many years to make this dream a reality.

Maker Motes: our first Arduino workshop for geography teachers

through our Maker Motes approach, our team has been helping schools with open-source hardware for nearly four years.

we have been very privileged to have been able to do so.

through our recent partnership with a small inter-divisional team from the Ministry of Education, we had the opportunity to conceptualise and conduct our first Arduino workshop for geography teachers :-)

Maker Motes in pre-service geography teacher education course on catchment conservation and management

following on from my post ten months' ago, in which i shared about a collaboration with my friends from the Humanities and Social Studies Education Academic Group of the National Institute of Education, my team and i were very privileged today to participate in AAG33B, a course for pre-service geography teachers, themed on Catchment Conservation and Management, conducted by A/P Kim Irvine.

:-)

Maker Motes: investigating wind and rain

our team has been working with teachers from schools both locally and regionally in helping craft curriculum for more authentic geography learning and STEM integration.

here's a pic from one of our more recent collaborations - we found it particularly exciting to combine traditional meteorological instruments with the Internet of Things :-)

Maker Motes featured in Vol 8 of OER Knowledge Bites

a year ago, i shared how my team had been invited to conduct a presentation during the Humanities Education Research Seminar, on our work on open-source environmental sensors (Maker Motes).

i am very happy to update that the presentation has been written up in Volume 8 of the Office of Education Research (OER) Knowledge Bites :-)

here's the 326 k download :-)

Maker Motes: sharing with geographers from the Nguyen Tat Thanh University

yesterday, thanks to an invitation from Prof Kim Irvine of the Humanities & Social Studies Education Academic Group of the National Institute of Education, my team and i had the opportunity to interact with a visiting delegation of geographers from a private university in Vietnam, namely the Nguyen Tat Thanh University.

with gratitude to Prof Irvine and Dr Josh Ho, we were able to spend two hours exchanging ideas with the visitors, primarily regarding our work with Maker Motes.

Maker Motes and Geographic Information Systems (GIS): appointment as Research Mentor

through God's grace, a collaboration between my team and a small inter-divisional team from the Ministry of Education here in Singapore, will be starting next year.

we just received the wonderful news that our application for funding of approximately US$25000 has been approved, and this means we will be able to work with teachers from two schools on taking our Maker Motes approach to new contexts of learning.

i am very grateful for this partnership, because they are presently all too rare and the diversity of perspectives each party brings can only strengthen the design of the learning intervention.

my team and i are very excited about this collaboration, which is titled an exploratory study on how a GIS-based inquiry empowered with unstructured making can lead to better decision making in students about their school environment.

Maker Motes: Geography Symposium hosted by the Curriculum Planning & Development Division, Ministry of Education

our team has been invited by the Geography Unit of the Curriculum Planning & Development Division of the Ministry of Education, Singapore, to share our work on the use of open-source microclimate sensors (Maker Motes) in Geographical Investigation :-)

we thank God for this opportunity to interact with teachers during the Geography Symposium, which will take place in the afternoon of the 22nd of May, at the Lifelong Learning Institute.

if you are a geography teacher based in Singapore, please do look out for the announcements from the Ministry of Education - we would love to engage you in conversation that afternoon :-)