In September 2013, 50 students from the Singapore Polytechnic (SP) formed multidisciplinary and multinational teams, participated in the inaugural Learning Express programme (LeX). LeX is a unique transnational social innovation programme where students make use of their domain knowledge, to conceive and co-create with rural villagers on social projects in a sustainable way. This is unlike a typical Community Service programme where students usually contribute merely their labour to work on some predefined projects without having the sense of ownership. LeX programme is developed using CDIO framework and consists of 2 parts which are C-D & D-I-O. For the first part, students spent 12 days in the host countries; using the SP Design Thinking framework for their ethnographic studies, to uncover the unmet needs of the community. Each SP students were paired with another student from a partnering institute of the host country. Being mindful not to disrupt the villagers' daily routines with a large influx of outsiders (together with their local buddies), these 50 social innovators from SP were divided into 2 teams that was further divided into 6 sub-teams. 25 SP students were arranged to visit 3 villages in Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh, 2-15 September) while another 25 students went to another 3 villages in Indonesia (Yogyakarta, 16-28 September). Each village was led by one faculty from the Singapore Polytechnic and one from the partnering institute. Projects conceived from the 6 villages include productive tools, new products and heritage tourism model. As part of the curriculum, credit units were given in-lieu of a compulsory course (Social Innovation Project- SIP). For second part to the LeX programme, some of the solutions conceived were designed and implemented via capstone project or project based courses. Working prototypes that leverage on locally available resources would then be developed and delivered back the villages. Besides using local resources, to maintain the sustainability of the projects, the community would then be trained to know the building, operating and maintaining processes. One of the objectives of LeX programme is to give an opportunity for students to experience a typical product/ process creation process by going through the C-D-I-O stages before their capstone project. Students have a sense of purpose in relating their disciplinary knowledge to solving real life problems. They also developed camaraderie working with students from various schools and also with students from overseas. Judging from the spontaneous forming of Facebook groups among students, this will contribute some way in establishing lasting friendship among ASEAN students; which is an important outcome, given the prospect of having all 10 ASEAN countries to complete the ASEAN economic integration by 2015. With contacts established with partnering institutes and goodwill extended with the villages, the Singapore Polytechnic will continue to focus on more underprivileged communities within South East Asia countries. It is our hope to nurture students with a gung-ho and "can do" spirit, to work and play in an interconnected world.
Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014