21 October 2019

40 Singapore schools will be getting new principals next year, as part of the Ministry of Education’s annual reshuffle exercise.

This practice allows schools to benefit from new perspectives, and enables experienced principals to bring and share best practices across schools.

This year, 21 schools will be getting first-time principals. They include Mr Kevin Pang Chin Keat, who will head Yuhua Secondary School, and Madam Tey Kah Hwee, who will helm Cedar Girls’ Secondary.

The 40 new principals will receive their letters of appointment from MOE’s director-general of education Wong Siew Hoong, at a ceremony in December which Education Minister Ong Ye Kung will attend.

18 October 2019

Raffles Girls’ School is moving from Anderson Road to Braddell later this month. All 1,600 students and 180 staff members will start school at the new Braddell campus then.

The school, which also celebrates its 140th anniversary this year, wants to reach out to its new community and be a part of it. It is already starting with seven Housing Board blocks in Braddell and Toa Payoh. RGS principal Mdm Poh Mun See said that these blocks were seen as having been most affected by the construction work over the past two years.

“The Braddell-Toa Payoh community is a lot more in the heartlands than here (Anderson Road), where there are a lot of expatriates. So we see a lot of opportunities for our girls to engage with the local community,” Mdm Poh added.

Being opposite Raffles Institution is also a sort of reunification as RGS started as a one-room department in RI at Bras Basah Road.

There will be more opportunities to share facilities and student programmes between RI and RGS, said Mrs Poh, adding that RGS is looking at an optional boarding programme for its girls at RI’s hostels, which will be gender-segregated.

16 October 2019

Kaesang Pangarep, son of Indonesian President Joko Widodo, graduated from the Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) recently.

Mr Kaesang, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in marketing with a minor in communications, was also one of three students honoured for entrepreneurship at the graduation ceremony held last Wednesday.

The awards recognise graduating students who have shown strong entrepreneurial attributes such as leadership and a “high potential for achieving a positive impact on society”, SUSS said.

Around 2,000 SUSS graduands received their bachelor’s and higher degree certificates this year.

Mr Kaesang has founded six businesses, the latest being Ternakopi, a coffee delivery brand that has raised seed money from angel investors and venture capitalists. His first start-up — established before he entered SUSS — was Sang Javas, which sold T-shirts. It was a flop, but the failure did not deter him.

During his four years at SUSS, Mr Kaesang also founded Sang Pisang, a banana fritter franchise, board game firm Hompimpagames, food app Madhang.id and restaurant site Kaetering, in addition to Ternakopi.

15 September 2019

Singapore students have won the International Young Physicists Tournament held in Warsaw, Poland, from July 6 to 13. This is the republic’s seventh consecutive win in as many years.

Their challengers were students from as many as 33 other countries or territories.

The Singapore team comprised of four students from Raffles Institution and one from NUS High School of Mathematics and Science. In the competition, the students presented their research work and also provided feedback on other teams’ work.

Meanwhile, at the 50th International Physics Olympiad held in Tel Aviv, Israel, from July 7 to 15, Singapore bagged two gold and two silver medals, and one bronze medal to place joint eighth out of 78 countries or territories.

In the IPhO, students had to conduct experiments on the thermal and electrical properties of different metals, among other things.

And at the 60th International Mathematical Olympiad held in Bath, Britain, from July 11 to 22, Singapore won two gold and four silver medals, placing eighth among 112 countries or territories.

06 August 2019

Ms Shermaine Ang was recently awarded the Singapore Police Force Scholarship (SPFS), one of the most prestigious scholarships awarded by the Public Service Commission.

The SPFS was first awarded in 1979, and this year marks the first time that a female applicant has been successful in securing the scholarship.

The other three recipients of the SPFS are Mr Justin Quek, and Mr Warren Liow, both from Raffles Institution, as well as Mr Yiik Chia from HCI.

These students are among 23 recipients of various scholarships recently given out by the Ministry of Home Affairs at a ceremony in the Istana.

Minister for Home Affairs and Law K. Shanmugam, who was the guest of honour of the MHA scholarship award ceremony, noted that more students were interested in a Home Team career this year compared to previous years.

Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen had said in July that applications for defence scholarships hit an all-time high of about 1,700 this year.

26 July 2019

Singapore’s universities and polytechnics will increase efforts to train people in emerging skills such as machine learning and data analytics, in order to equip the workforce for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or Industry 4.0.

Speaking at the annual SkillsFuture Festival, Mr Chee Hong Tat, Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry and Education, said that Industry 4.0 is not about replacing existing workers with machines or new workers, but the training of existing workers to use new technologies.

The National University of Singapore will play its role by starting a new Master of Science in Industry 4.0 next month to help workers keep pace with digital advances. The new programme will cover areas such as data analytics, digital infrastructure and transformation systems, and include an industrial attachment.

Singapore’s institutes of higher learning will continue to work with each other to develop “stackable” modular courses in Industry 4.0. An example of such a programme would be NUS’ Institute of Systems Science’s partnership with Ngee Ann Polytechnic and Temasek Polytechnic to allow modules from the polytechnics’ post-diploma programmes to be counted towards a Master of Technology at NUS.