CNA Money Mind (Episode 40)
Air Date: 10 March 2019
Alan Yong, Nullspace Robotics Chief Executive, shares about the trend of education in robotics and technology, and why it is important to teach kids critical thinking and problem solving skills. Featured as well are our students at Centre for Robotics Learning, and ThinkCrate, our electronics and programming product line.
“10 years ago such classes were unheard of. Parents typically sign up students for piano classes, ballet classes, or speech and drama. Robotics enrichment wasn’t a big thing. It was only in the past few years that it started getting more popular. In 2017 we had about 200 new students enrolled with us and in 2018 we had about 300, so that’s about 50% growth over the past year.”
“So there’s kind of a problem solving step that we want to inculcate in the kids, what we call “Engineering Design Process”, of constantly asking the right questions and improving on your solutions.”
“Singapore kids are very well adjusted in terms of technology literacy. A lot of them are already very familiar with the iPhones, iPads, using the computers, using the internet. What we want to do over here in our classes is to shift them away from just being consumers of technology to being creators of technology.”
Watch the video here (segment starts at 16:30)
