The Community Platform

Inspiration

Based on my own experience as an educator (and hearing from my colleagues and friends in the profession), the vast majority of students in Singapore tend to get involved in existing projects and have limited exposure to real world problem solving. This results in recurrence of low-impact projects since students tend to hear about similar ideas since the nature of their social circles reinforce an echochamber effect.

What it does

The platform is meant to provide guidance and some inspiration to students who might be keen to explore problems in their community in an authentic way. Problem setters help to craft a detailed writeup about the issue that they are experiencing such that students can get onboard and try to solve a problem they are passionate about.

This helps to mitigate the limited exposure in a school setting since both students and staff alike have limited exposure to rapid changes in their communities, thereby providing students with a more authentic problem solving environment rather than ones engineered by staff.

How I built it

I built it on mediawiki or fandom to appeal to youths who might already be reading such wikis on their own. This is meant to be an open source platform that allows everyone to contribute and share their problem journey to inspire staff and students alike to have a greater stake in the community around them.

Challenges I ran into

Time - this is especially challenging since work is rather stressful during this window.

Technical expertise is certainly lacking since I never designed or managed a wiki prior to this - the MVP is a bit basic but at least demonstrates core principles. Even then the design is unfortunately subpar which is ironic for a product about design thinking

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

A somewhat working prototype that espouses ideals I believe in

What I learned

Hackathons require teamwork and individuals don't go very far Technical expertise and design intuition goes a long way to design a friendly experience/ interface

What's next for The Community Platform

Will try to build on it within my school and encourage individuals to add to it Within schools there is a wealth of expertise that isn't shared. I hope this helps to consolidate knowledge in my school and beyond (nation next) - may youths be inspired to go forth and take on problems in good faith