Our partners have a crucial role to play in providing opportunities and setting examples for our students. I am glad that corporate organisations such as Sembawang Shipyard and its partners are taking a pro-active role by organising the annual Green Wave Environmental Care Competition for our students.
7Green Wave is a useful platform for getting young Singaporeans involved in environmental conservation. Through the competition, students will gain an appreciation of the environmental challenges that Singapore and other countries face.
8The competition also challenges students to come up with creative, out-of-the-box solutions. It seeks to motivate students to experiment with ideas and technologies to develop new ways to protect the environment. This ties in well with what we are working towards in education, as we want to nurture young Singaporeans to look beyond their textbooks and use their innovative ideas and abundant energies to create a better society. Competitions like Green Wave provide them with an opportunity to identify real life problems, work in teams, undertake research and come up with practical solutions.
9This is apparent in the team of four students from Hwa Chong Institution, who is this year’s first prize winner for the JC/ITE category. Tapping on their creativity, perseverance and leadership qualities, these youths have helped the community to kick-start a series of environmentally-friendly schemes. They launched a Green Station near Community Centres, where residents can exchange recyclables for cash vouchers, and went house to house teaching residents about the “Ten-minute mozzie wipeout” to combat dengue. The HCI team also launched the National Youth EnvirOlympics, which has made environmental protection ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ with the teenage crowd. In fact, their passion and enthusiasm is clearly spreading as they’ve managed to establish a youth committee of over 20 members and 1000 youth volunteers. This is an impressive achievement.
10Even the young ones have shown maturity beyond their years when it comes to environmental conservation. For the young team from St Hilda’s Primary School, a walk around their school one day ended up sparking off a prize-winning idea. I’m told that after noticing that vending machines in school are switched on 24/7, these primary school pupils came up with the idea of building a solar-powered vending machine. It’s a simple yet significant idea that reduces our carbon footprint without sacrificing life’s little conveniences