Being one of the leaders in technology in this region of Asia, Singapore is now taking pre-school education to a whole new level by integrating digital literacy into the curriculum. A company based in the country called Jules has developed a program with an aim to promote and teach computational thinking to the young ones.
Called the School of Fish, the curriculum was a more structured approach to get kids familiar with coding compared to existing websites. It can easily be integrated in the preschool’s teaching programs.
The target is for the kids to acquire computational thinking, which is a method involving breaking down problems into smaller parts, recognizing patterns, and developing step-by-step solutions. That is how coders and programmers approach their problems, while still encouraging creative thinking.
Jules has coordinated with preschools in Singapore including Carpe Diem, Sherwood Childcare, and Cherie Hearts to involve School of Fish in their everyday lessons. In January, Cherie Hearts, a subsidiary of educational childcare company G8 Education, had 23 of its centers teach the program among 345 of its pupils.
Learning the lessons is fairly engaging to the preschoolers as they are delivered in tablets in the most interactive way. It features teacher characters, games, activities, and videos, with a dashboard that lets parents monitor their child’s performance.
Jonathan Chan, founder of Jules, believes that their program is an important tool to jumpstart the abilities of kids to code.
“Through School of Fish, we believe more preschoolers can learn and improve their digital literacy, even at a young age,” he says. “The learning process must be fun and interactive for children.”
Using of tablets in such schools should not be an issue as four-year-olds these days are already immersed with the technology through their iPads. No matter, preschools regulate the time of use of the students under the School of Fish program.
This isn’t the only time that Singapore has involved digital literacy in the early stages of its education. In 2017, the country had 19 secondary schools in the city-state replace the computer studies subjects with O level programming. The institutions involved already teach Python, which was only taught at A level before.
Source: Tech in Asia
