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BlockCyber’s 4Es – Enrich, Engage, Empower and Empathy
BlockCyber’s 4Es – Enrich, Engage, Empower and Empathy
How BlockCyber embraces the 4Es as our goal and mission.
Think 3D printing. Think Hydroponic Vertical farming. How about a cleaning robot for offices? Would we consider riding in a self-drive car? Machine-made coffee to perfection, anyone?
Welcome to the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or Industry 4.0)! Simply put, the Industry 4.0 is the ongoing automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices, using modern smart technology[1]. We are living in the world where digitalisation and technology is in every part of our lives, right here, right now.
As parents, wouldn’t we want our children to be prepared and in fact, take on what the digital world is offering? Digitalisation has so inter-weaved itself into our children’s lifestyle: The HBL (Home-Based Learning) during the Circuit Breakers accelerated the pace in which they tap into technology to facilitate learning; Student Learning Space (SLS) is where they do their homework and learn new lessons; Coding classes are offered in many schools as part of the curriculum. The world we are living in now is already revolutionalised by digitalisation and technology. We need to ready our children for this Revolution.
Here at BlockCyber, we prepare our participants to brave this Revolution head on. Our goal and mission is to Enrich, Engage and Empower participants for the Fourth Industrial Revolution through training, community work and consulting services. It is also our heart that our participants learn the value of Empathy as well.
- Enrich
Youths can learn real world cyber-digital skills.
Let’s get practical. What is the use of learning digital skills if we do not know how to apply them to real world scenarios and case studies? We would expect the courses to help us connect the dots with what we have learnt, to what is happening in the cyber-world. Moreover, we would also want to experience working on real world projects which help us see how our learning comes together.
Even if we experience failure in dabbling with these real world examples, we learn first-hand how to handle these failures. This value-adds to our overall learning, which in fact, leads to greater success later.
In BlockCyber’s courses, participants are able to combine practical experience with up to the minute learning. For example, in our cyber-security courses, participants will be taught how to protect their computer system from hackers and keeping them at bay. This is definitely a real world cyber-digital skill we want your children to learn, as we see how rampant cyber-attacks and scams are nowadays.
- Engage
Cyber-digital learning can be fun and engaging.
One-way-teacher-to-student teaching. Boring!
Falling asleep in a dull class. Yawn!
Cyber-digital learning made fun with practices along the way. Totally!
An engaging classroom with lots of discussions and play. Yes!
The above tells us that fun and engaging learning in a classroom is a key factor in learning. Gone are the days where participants just listen to instructors download their lessons to a class of non-engaging students. Now, effective learning takes place in a classroom full of happenings.
“Student engagement” is defined as meaningful student involvement throughout the learning environment.”[2]
Meaningful student involvement includes activities such as games, discussions, quizzes, question-and-answer sessions, group work and presentations. These are a constant feature we employ in our classes to capture the attention of our participants so as to maximise their learning capacities. To add, these fun activities help to create a vibrant learning environment which stimulates the retention of knowledge, deepens understanding and sharpens focus. Learning should be this way, isn’t it?
At BlockCyber, we deliberately incorporate gamification to optimize the learning process. In our upcoming online learning portal, students choose their characters/avatars and go through storyboards to solve escape-room type challenges, and while doing so, picked up important cyber-digital skills such as coding, encryption, ethical hacking, computer forensics, etc.
In our live classes, the instructors in BlockCyber are trained to engage participants in a fun and engaging atmosphere in the classroom. Our courses are designed to ensure participants are engaged in active learning. There will never be a boring lesson taught here. To pique your interest: all our classes will end with a signature “Capture the Flag” competition where our participants go through different stages of challenge with the aim to win the competition. These challenges inevitably reinforce their learning.
Our participants summed it all…
“Capture the Flag was thrilling and the added virtual machines were quite easy to use.” – Wynston (March Camp)
“The trainers were very patient and helped us a lot. The class was good as it was more hands-on and not just purely theory based.” – Hui Hui (December Camp)
“The trainer was very engaging and had a really unique method of teaching that allowed me to absorb more information.” – Reyes (December Camp)
- Empower
Youths can connect with the industry with confidence.
We want our participants who have gone through our courses to be able to connect with the industry with confidence. They will be able to speak confidently about the topics they have learnt and share enthusiastically with people what they know. At the same time, they should be able to showcase excitedly their new found skills to the people around them. We seek to design our courses to achieve these objectives.
As such, we are planning to bring industry experts into our courses to share with our participants real-life applications. Furthermore, we are looking forward to creating a network of participants with industry experts so that our BlockCyber community will continue to network, reinforce learning, deepen skills and share resources.
- Empathy
Youths can give back to the community with their skills.
Award winning American actor, director and producer, Denzel Washington once said, “At the end of the day it’s not about what you have or even what you’ve accomplished… it’s about who you’ve lifted up, who you’ve made better. It’s about what you’ve given back.”
At BlockCyber, we want our participants to lift someone up, better someone’s life and give back to the community with what they have learnt or accomplish in our courses. Be it the underpriviledged, under-served or elderlies, our participants can be a blessing by giving back to these communities.
Empathy is the ability to understand and feel for others. It is a value which we hope our participants would cultivate as they journey together with us. It is more than just feeling for others but moving beyond the feelings and putting into action what they feel.
We frame our teachings to ensure our participants learn Empathy. It is our desire to democratise IT skills to make it accessible to the communities we want to reach out to. We hope to create structured programmes to involve our participants to teach and upskill these communities for free or at a very low rate. Those who benefited from the free programmes will pay it forward and be involved in future runs of these programmes. Those who volunteer to teach is a way of giving back to the community and by teaching, they actually reinforce their own learning.
In this Straits Time article[3], Tengku Hafidz remembered falling in love with coding during a class in polytechinic. A software engineer now, he gives free web development classes to secondary school students in his community. He is also one of the creators of Makan Rescue, an app that alerts people to surplus food nearby. As digital skills are increasingly important in our daily living, people like Tengku who know about coding, programming or data analytics are using their skills to benefit others.
The above is a good example of what we strongly encourage our participants to catch on while learning together with us.
As you can see, BlockCyber embraces the 4Es—Enrich, Engage, Empower and Empathy—as our goal and mission in our training, community work and consulting services, so that our participants are ready to take on the Revolution ahead of them. So bring it on, Industry 4.0! We are more than ready!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Industrial_Revolution
[2] https://www.nais.org/Articles/Documents/Member/2016%20HSSSE%20Chapter-1.pdf
[3] https://www.straitstimes.com/lifestyle/do-good-with-tech
Written by Carol Lim
Carol is a freelance editorial coordinator for her religious denominational newsletter for eight years. She plans, edits, writes and proofreads articles for this publication. In addition, she is also their social media administrator. In her leisure time, she paints, crafts, cooks and reads. She has two teenage children.