My career aspiration is to be an educator. After 15+ years working in a healthcare institution, I have reached a certain milestone in my life where I hope to pursue my 2nd career as an educator in the public service.
My motivation is to bring my experience, knowledge, skills and attitude to help students bring out the best version of themselves.
JC or Poly?
One of the few regrets in my life was that I chose the “safer” Junior College (JC) route. JC trains their students to have an analytical and sharp mind by drilling into them content and analysis. They offer many different subjects and even allows a mix and match of different subjects.
However, I find JC subjects very theoretical and much prefer the “applied” approach of
polytechnics. Polys offer as many interesting subjects but with an added slant towards applied learning. Coupled with internship opportunities, polytechnic route offers much more real world preparation for students in terms of dealing with resources and working with others (collaboration!) to get things done on time at a certain level of quality.
Technically, they are being taught to create a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) that would be able to reach the customer before competitors. This "Speed to market" is a key strategy to capturing market share when they eventually create products or services that have to be made available to their customer.
It's one thing to teach about innovation, but it's entirely different to have actually tried, fail fast and try again. Over the past few years, I attempted some innovative approaches to learning. The projects segment of my online CV (https://bhchia.wixsite.com/cv2020/projects) covers a few examples in detail.
Serious Games
I chanced on the concept of “Serious Games” in 2015. I found it intriguing that some concepts of gamification could be used to build games that could help in the teaching, learning and even healing process.
So, together with Ms Eunice Toh, TTSH Executive Director, Community Fund and Dr Loh Yong Joo, we became the founding co-directors of TTSH Serious Games Unit (SGU) in 2016. Besides being the main coordinator of the monthly meetings with the other SGU members, I assumed a leadership role and contributed to the successes of the various SGU/ALIVE-related initiatives till date.
Some of the more notable ones include:
NHG Game Jam 2015
HIT Challenge 2016
ALIVE-SIDM Internship Program 2017-2019
Principal investigator (PI) for a healthcare communications serious game "Taming Black Elephants" (2018)
Co-PI assisting Dr Aung Myint Oo’s surgical Simulation game that focuses on laparoscopic training (2019)
SHBC 2017 ALIVE track
SHBC 2018
Set up ALIVE Learn and Explore with ALIVE through Play (LEAP) corner at CHI Kumpung Square in 2019
However, over the last few years, it dawned on me that it was during my role as a PI and co-PI that I found my work most meaningful. Working with poly students (I had some wonderful students from Singapore Polytechnic) to refine the blueprint Game design document (GDD), monitor their progress and eventually completing the prototype was extremely heart-warming.
Throughout the journey, the students constantly questioned and revisited certain approaches each time an obstacle came up. I feel good that I had a role to play in encouraging them to be forward-looking and have a questioning mindset. Of course this meant that their internship was anything but easy! However, everyone felt extremely accomplished when we finished a working prototype within a compressed timeline.
If everything comes on a silver platter, how will our students survive when they are thrown into the working world that is VUCA?
For my 2nd career, I envision myself supporting students, teachers, and parents. I firmly believe that my experience, knowledge, skills and attitude will be beneficial to nurturing young minds, as well as supporting teachers and parents.
Benedict Chia 17 Feb 2020
(update, 21 Sep 2022: happy to share that I am 5 months into my new role at NUS and enjoying every moment of my new environment, new colleagues and new challenges!)
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