Since its establishment in 2016, UMP STEM Lab has served as a community center that supports innovation and STEM outreach programs to not only school children but also school teachers.
We started off by having computer programming and electronic system classes, basically serving as a platform to encourage more electronics based project/innovation among school children. Back then, the participation were mainly to prepare school children and teachers for exhibitions and competitions such as Young Innovators Challenge, Citrex. The classes later evolved by embedding the curriculum of robotics and intermediate programming involving micro controllers and micro computers.
Beginning 2017, MDeC has recognized UMP STEM Lab as one of its Center of Professional Development (CPD). Since then, we have been offering courses such as computational thinking, Arduino programming, web design, game design and database. Back in 2019, we received a fund from the Ministry of Education (MoE) to handle classes on Python Programming and Internet of Things.
Apart from CPD courses that are tailored to suit MoE’s curriculum, STEM Lab also offered digital making classes, with the ultimate motivation – to expose the teachers and young school children to the fascinating world of engineering 🙂 .
To date, more than 190 teachers were trained in the lab.
