SST Incorporated

SST INCORPORATED SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, SINGAPORE

an Arduino board made by SST

DELIVERING THE ELEVATOR PITCH CHAPTER 1

SOME OF THE EMPLOYEES OF SST INC.

All In A Day’s Work It is 5 pm, and Chan Hong is discussing client feedback to the concept that he has just presented with his team.

This is week ten since the team received the initial brief from the doctors of the KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital. The team hopes to prototype the app with a core group of anaesthetists, but they know that they need to ensure data integrity in the computation of the various drug dosage before the app is

launched officially to the Paediatric Anaesthesia department.

This is all in a day’s work of an app developer, one might say. Except that Chan Hong is neither a rising talent at a n

Mock-up Screens of the KKH PAN app 3

established digital firm nor the ambitious owner of a local start-up.

KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital Paediatric Anaesthesia app meeting in SST Inc. Boardroom.

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SST Incorporated Conceptualised as an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) talent development programme at the School of Science and Technology, Singapore (SST), SST Incorporated (Inc.) replicates a corporate set-up of var ious companies within a conglomerate.

Companies have the free reign to hire, fire and even poach employees from other companies.

If this seems a tad like a teenage version of playing house, the students will be quick to point out that their clients have ranged from National Institute of Education, KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital, SportSG and SST itself.

Mass training of coding to junior employees by the senior employees.

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Since its inception in 2011, SST Inc. has published more than 16 iOS Apps and have ported some of them to the Google Play Store as well. Pride and professionalism are evident in the way alumni students continue to work on improving past projects and mentor current students.

SST Incorporated Movie 1.1 SST Inc.

An introduction to SST Inc.

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Besides developing apps, the students play an active role in advocating technology to the nation.

They plan and execute initiatives that help enable other students to learn and hone ICT skills.

Such efforts include hackathons, make-a-thons and workshops for Primary and Secondary school students. Encouraged to test boundaries, the students are regularly featured in tertiary events a n d Gallery 1.1 Hackathons and Make-A-Thons

HDB Cool Ideas Hack

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professional hackathons such as Angelhack and HDB Cool Ideas Hack as the youngest participants.

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SST Incorporated Movie 1.3 Lorem Ipsum dolor amet, consectetur Movie 1.4 2015 Hackathon@SST

SST Inc. Employees ran the 2013 and 2015 Hackathons This is one of the promotional videos created.

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Movie 1.2 Advocating Technology

Gallery 1.2 Advocating Technology

SST Inc. employees share their app development journey to educators at the Apple Leadership Camp

SST Inc. employees 2014 - Sharing to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong

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Movie 1.5 #ProjectSF Day 4 Reflections

SST Inc. employees describing their learning from Apple Inc. and Zendesk while they were in San Francisco.

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DECODING THE BIG IDEA CHAPTER 2

SST INC. IS PART OF THE SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, SINGAPORE

The Context

When then Minister of Education Tharman Shanmugaratnam’ announced the establishment of SST, he spoke of the need to groom a different breed of innovators to bring the nation forward:

“

We know our future has to be in innovation, in every field we engage in, whether it is media and design, financial services, or precision engineering. It requires a whole team of people, focused on continually improving and seeking a competitive edge through innovation.

But it also requires a special cut of individuals, those with a special passion for what they do and the urge to keep going beyond the ordinary. These are the

“

Singapore Parliamentary Report (2008, March 04), Vol. 84

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Started as an institution with the raison d’etre to open new pathways and different a p p ro a c h e s to l e a r n i n g i n S i n g a p o re ’s education landscape, SST has created diversified pathways within itself to help students discover and hone their unique talents. SST Inc. was started as one of many talent development programmes for all

The iconic facade of the School of Science and Technology, Singapore

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students who have a passion in technopreneurship.

Scaffolding Skills Acquisition

Students attending ICT lessons

S S T a d o p t s Tr e f f i n g e r ’s ‘ L e v e l s o f Service’ (LoS) model in implementing a talent development framework (Treffinger et al., 2004) across the different disciplines and p ro g r a m m e s . T h e Lo S m o d e l i nvo l ve s collaboration among educators, students, parents and the community to ensure that every learner’s educational experience is appropriate, challenging, and differentiated.

And it is because of this belief that SST decided to push the learning of technology

and skills beyond the confines of the classrooms.

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Design And Programming (Foundational Courses)

Senior SST Inc. Employee conducting Cyber Security course.

Levels of Service 1 Productivity and Microcontrollers (Foundational Courses) Formal ICT lessons set the foundation for all students.

They ensure that students are progressively equipped with skills in the use of online platforms and creation tools such as Apple’s iWork and iLife suite of applications.

Python and Arduino were also introduced in recent years to students at the lower secondary. These skills are needed to meet the demands of learning tasks in the various disciplines.

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Students are taught Blockly, MIT App Inventor and GameSalad as an introduction and foundation to app and games programming.

Students are introduced to desktop publishing tools such as Adobe

asynchronously. Technology use in the classroom also enables all students to be actively engaged in constructing meaningful learning during lessons.

Super Casual day @ internship at Codigo

Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. These courses are further supplemented by using of MOOCs for flipped learning on coding and design, which allows students to learn

Levels 20

of Service 2 Design And Programming (Intermediate Introductory Courses) Students who are interested to further their passion for app development will join SST Inc. in the second semester of their secondary one year. They will go through a four months training course conducted by their seniors in SST Inc. Students will have the opportunity to select from the following electives: • Computing • UI/UX • Swift coding.

Students will be inducted into SST Inc. as associate employees after they complete an elective under the mentorship of a senior in SST Inc.

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An Interdisciplinary Approach to Grooming Passionate Innovators

SST-3M InnoScience Challenge

Indeed, SST Inc. is just one example of how the school has reimagined learning for a greater purpose. The school believes in helping learners uncover big ideas that cut to the heart of disciplines and across disciplines.  In SST-designed subjects such Art, Design, Media and Technology (ADMT) and Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E), students apply Design Thinking and  Challenge-Based Learning in identifying needs of a target

audience before creating the corresponding solutions.

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Many of these projects require students to integrate concepts and skills from different disciplines. Where possible, corporate partners such as 3M join in the fray to provide an authentic context for the students to “ply their trade�. Skills acquired by this broadbased programme serve as a foundation to reinforce the flavour of technopreneurship in SST Inc. Even in regular subjects, the school seeks to push boundaries with commonly available tools as

opposed to specialised

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People Development a Key Priority

Kathleen Ferenz conducted PD for SST Staff in the early years

The school believes that teachers are the key to delivering its promise to facilitate learning in a whole new way. As such, professional development has been a top priority for the school leaders since the inception of the school, and in collaboration with department heads, they determine the learning needs of the staff by getting their input on their Learning Needs, lesson walkthroughs, student surveys and interviews. Professional

development in SST takes place on several levels:

Executive committee (EXCO) receiving PD in technology 26

School-wide Professional Development (PD) I n t h e e a r l y y e a r s o f t h e s c h o o l ’s establishment, training in curriculum design, applied learning, and ICT use in the classroom was the focus. Established practitioners such as Susan Clayton (UbD), Don Treffinger (Talent Development and Creative Problem S o l v i n g ) a n d G a r y S m i t ( L i c k o n a ’s Comprehensive Model of Character Education) were consulted. The school engaged Apple Distinguished Educators such

Brown bag sessions

as Randy Yerrick and Kathleen Ferenz to train the staff. Teachers gained invaluable insights into the efficacious use of technology for teaching and were encouraged to challenge the status quo.

Internal Expertise The key role of the PD Committee in SST is to build internal capacity and is aligned to the school values of ‘Building An Empowered C o m m u n i t y ’ a n d ‘ E x p a n d i n g Le a r n i n g Networks’. Teachers who were identified by their reporting officers or IP Heads to be high performing or potential Senior Teachers (STs) were deployed to the PD Committee and worked with KPs to conduct in-house Expert Group PD sessions or co-lead the professional discussions in their own departments.

Within the school, it is a ritual to set aside an hour every alternate Monday morning for professional development workshops or discussions to ensure consistent 27

practice in alignment with espoused approaches. At the department level, time is set aside for lesson preparation meetings, and a significant amount of time is put aside at the end of each semester for review of teaching and learning matters. Apple continues to Aurelius is a firm believer in using ICT in education. He has developed video podcasts as teaching tools and conducts professional development sessions for teachers. He has been sharing and training teachers in the use of technology in classrooms. As a tech news junkie and a geek, who loves tinkering with gadgets, Aurelius hopes to advocate technology as a means to improving our everyday lives.

Hoe Teck is a passionate science teacher who believes in innovative approaches to education. Currently, Hoe Teck holds the Senior Teacher (Science) appointment in SST. His current interest lies in Astronomy, Physics, Electronics, Science Research and STEM education.

Irfan Darian is an ADE from the Class of 2015, who's passionate about the use of technology for teaching and learning, in and out of the classrooms. Other than looking at the development of the Art, Design, Media and Technology (ADMT) curriculum here in SST, his current scope of work includes the development of the Maker Lab@SST, and its accompanying STEAM-centric programmes and events. His specific key areas of interest includes looking at how Design Thinking could be leveraged to deepen and extend students' learning, and how content areas across subjects could be integrated more seamlessly, to ensure that effective and authentic learning takes place.

Kwai Yin joined SST as a pioneer member of the middle management team. She was instrumental in conceptualising, planning and implementing the roll-out of the 1-to-1 ICT-enabled learning programme. A very experienced teacher, Kwai Yin believes that creative and effective use of technology does not necessary rely on it being "state of the art", new or sophisticated. It could be simple yet applied in ways that others might not have explored. Effective use of technology deepens learning, and curriculum must not be driven by technology but through mindful integration and practices.

suppor t SST 28

in strengthening its staff competencies through regular coaching on how to take learning to the next level. “I really appreciate the school's support for

Professional Learning Community

professional development. This is reflected in the ecosystem that allows me to take time off for workshops/courses and the encouragement from the school leaders. There is a strong culture of learning that spurs us to level-up as a community and bring out the best in our learners/students.

Having attended a one-year course to upgrade my skills as a computing teacher, I feel better equipped with relevant content skills and network to help SST Inc students sharpen their competencies in problem solving and programming.

I hope to pursue a Masters in Information Systems so as to strengthen the backend development and curriculum of Computing and SST inc.�

Quek Yin Kang Teacher/Computing

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CHANGING THE WORLD ONE APP AT A TIME CHAPTER 3

SST INC. EMPLOYEES CONDUCTING TECHNOLOGY OUTREACH TO HUAMIN PRIMARY SCHOOL

For the employees of SST Inc, the journey to impact society begins with an app. Some of their recent forays are profiled in the following sections...

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SST Open House The SST Open House app was created to augment the experience of visitors attending the school’s open house. It was first created in 2012 as a supplement to the programme booklet for the open house. Over the years, different companies set up by the students in SST Inc. have sought to update the app with improved functionality and design

The SST Open House app has evolved from just an app providing information of the open house to one with the intelligence to help visitors plan their activities

according to their time constraints and interests.

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SST Announcer SST has always prided itself on doing things differently. It is very common for schools to start every school day with a lengthy session of announcements. SST has thus decided to adopt the approach of putting the announcements online via a common “Student’s Blog” where all students can access it online.

However, the employees in SST Inc. could not accept the status quo, and they decided that an app would be much more beneficial for the SST community. With the SST Announcer app, the users can readily receive push notifications whenever a new announcement is made. The app contains a rich text RSS feed reader that automatically loads content f r o m t h e S t u d e n t ’ s B l o g .

release was written entirely in Swift.

To take the experience up a notch, Apple Watch support was included, directly after the launch of the first Apple Watch. The students can read the notifications straight from their wrists without even taking out their phones.

The app itself went through several major iterations. The first version was launched in 2013 and used Urban Airship as its backend server for push notifications. The second major version was launched in 2015 and was reengineered to use Parse as its backend as U r b a n

Airship cancelled their free tier. In addition to that, this 35

However, things changed towards the end of 2016 as Facebook bought over Parse and permanently shut it down. Ziyue, the original developer of the app, now an alumnus of SST, returned to develop the final, long-term service version of the application with his fellow SST Inc employees currently studying at SST. SST Inc. now has an exclusive AWS EC2 instance as the backend, and the backend code for the app is written in Python, making the app independent from third party service providers. The app itself is written with the latest technologies available, with Swift 3 as the primary programming language, support for dynamic type and size classes, full support for split screen on iPads and the interface stripped down to offer a clean, nofrills UI. The Apple Watch version was also completely redesigned to provide a better user experience, being fully compatible with watchOS 3.

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Lately As part of the yearly app development by SST Inc., Continuum Systems went through many iterations of ideas before eventually settling on Lately. Previously, Student Councillors passed late slips to students when they were late and recorded their name in a large binder file with a list of names of all the students in the school.

As a student councillor, Robin who is also the CEO of the company, has always found that that process was very inefficient and time consuming. Train disruptions often result in many latecomers. On these occasions, the student councillors had to write almost a hundred names in the file.

Thus, Continuum Systems came up with the idea of Lately to automate this process by scanning students’ pass/identification card when they are late for school and recording it in a backend server. Although Lately is not a very complex idea, it has helped to improve the efficiency of the Student Council.

Once Continuum Systems was done with the main functionality of the app, they started to focus more on the UI/UX of the app. The Apple iOS Human Interface Guidelines was c o n s u l te d regularly in the line of work to ensure that the app had c l a r i t y, deference a n d depth.

The first prototype of Lately only included the basic functionality of scanning a student’s identification card number. As students’ interest in Lately grew, support for extra features, such as notifications to parents, were added.

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Other Apps To access other projects, look up School of Science and Technology, Singapore in the iOS App Store https://itunes.apple.com/us/developer/school-science-technology/id649690368

WRITING FUTURE UPDATES CHAPTER 4

THE IDEATION TUNNEL OF SST INC. HQ.

While the students in SST Inc work on updating their apps, the school is designing changes at a wider level. Recognising that future innovators can find their niche along the ICT spectrum, the school is articulating progressions for their skills along the spectrums of a programmer, designer and maker. At a very fundamental level, all students learn python and Swift. Someone who is more interested in building apps may then take up MySQL, WatchOS, WatchKit or even HealthKit at the next level while the next student may choose to develop himself further in Adobe XD, UI/UX to pursue his interests in design.

Mrs Linda Chan, the Principal, explains, “Students are progressed along different levels of proficiency through differentiated experiences although there may still be overlaps in terms of some of the programmes they go through and the skills they pick up. While helping students uncover their talents and strengths, we also recognise the possibility of technology redefining roles and required skillsets. Moreover, having a broad understanding of these competencies will foster greater collaboration.�

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Epilogue: Pan Ziyue (Class of 2015) Ziyue is an aspiring programmer who wishes to create a better world through technology.

During his secondary school days at SST, he taught himself several aspects of computing, such as developing mobile apps for iOS. Some of the apps he developed are up on the App Store, such as Places@SST, a Bluetooth BLE beacon based indoor virtual tour application for SST

In 2014, he received the Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) scholarship.

This has thus spurred Ziyue to pick up programming languages such as C++ and Python which supplements his skills in mobile software design. His abilities also extend to managing Linux based servers to complement front end software. Other than software, he has developed competencies in hardware/PCB design, some of which were successfully printed and deployed by SST, such as the AQILITY (available on Github: https:// github.com/sammy0025/AQILITY).

Since his secondary school days, he cofounded a startup, FourierIndustries (https:// fourier.industries) (formerly known as StatiX Industries), specialising in mobile applications and circuit/embedded systems design.

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Epilogue: Jurvis Tan (Class of 2013) Jurvis is also a recipient of the WWDC scholarship in 2016. He is currently based in San Francisco working for a company called UserTesting as a software engineering intern.

H e h a s a s t ro n g i n t e re s t fo r s o l v i n g distribution-related problems in society, especially to do with food, education, and healthcare; things he believe are essential to the survival and success of future generations.

As someone who enjoys using the computer and solving real-world problems through the c r e a t i o n o f n e w, r e f r e s h i n g d i g i t a l experiences, he feels software has become the obvious approach through which he can contribute to the causes he cares about.

Hence, his personal strategy to knowledgeacquisition has largely been aligned to the attributes of  good software engineer.

Specialising in iOS and Web Development, he is proficient at languages such as Swift, Javascript, Ruby, and Elixir. He usually looks outside technology-centric focus structures in investigating problems that resonate with his passion.

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Epilogue: Rayner Tan (Class of 2013) Rayner was from the pioneer batch of SST INC. Together with schoolmates, Hardy Shien and Lee Yu Chong, he formed Helix in SST INC. Rayner has always been interested in technology and grew to love programming. He always found it a satisfying challenge. He also has a passion for games, which he followed after graduating from SST.

While studying in Temasek Polytechnic’s Diploma in Game Design and Development, Rayner has worked on a variety of games across mobile and PC platforms. His latest project is a multiplayer virtual reality game for SteamVR called Tower Power, which was showcased at Unite Singapore 2016. His new venture is a cross-platform local multiplayer mobile game. At the same time, he continues to work with his friends on his open-sourced tool for the Unity platform, which is known as DaburuTools.

Rayner’s dream is to create his own indie game development studio and craft experiences for all to have fun together.

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References 1. Treffinger, D.J, Young, G.C., Nassab, C.A., and Wittig, C.V. (2004). Enhancing and Expanding Gifted Programmes: The Levels of Service Approach. Waco, TX: Prufrock Press 2. Treffinger, D.J., Nassab, C. A., Schoonover, P.F., Selby, E.C., Shepardson, C. A., Wittig, C.V., & Young, G.C. The CPS Kit. Waco, TX: Prufrock Press.

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Acknowledgements Mrs Linda Chan (Principal) Email: Linda_Chan@sst.edu.sg Ms Lim Wai Lee (Vice-Principal) Email: Lim_Wai_Lee@sst.edu.sg Ng Kian Pin Corporate Communications Manager SST Corporate Communications Team SST Inc. Alumni Employees Jurvis Tan Si Jun Koh Chan Hong Maximillian Oh Yang Zhi Pan Ziyue Pyae Phyo Aung @ Elvis Kason Lin Rayner Tan Xue Wen Robin Vinod Sean Lim Kai Xiang

Mr Aurelius Yeo Head of Department, Educational Technology Email: Aurelius_Yeo@sst.edu.sg xlix

Copyright Š SST Incorporated, School of Science and Technology, Singapore Address: 1 Technology Drive Singapore 138572

www.sstinc.org

Tel: +65717200 Email: contactus@sst.edu.sg

https://www.facebook.com/ssticttdp/

https://twitter.com/sst_inc

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