EduAce, SM Sains Sultan Mahmud, Terengganu

Summary of Project:

EduAce project is based on the “from students to students'' concept. This project has two pathways for students to choose: one is a mentor immersion program and the other one is a website. Our goal is to help develop the interest in learning and create progressive environments among students.

Problem Statement:

We aim to help the low-scoring students in our community to tackle learning loss sustained during the pandemic and continuous loss of interest in learning.

After doing our research, we found out that these students who have been experiencing continuous learning loss are seeking help and they feel left behind.

We decided to plan an inter-school mentor immersion program and a workshop. This is to help the weakest students in our selected schools by providing in-person tutoring.

Other than that, we want to give students a new experience, expose them to fun ways of learning Chemistry, and plant interest in them regarding this subject. This is why EduAce wants to promote peer-to-peer mentoring projects so that they will not feel alone in their learning journey. We know that there is still room for improvement and we believe that the hustle will be worth it.

We saw that many students are in need of help with Chemistry and it seemed like there were no tutoring sessions for the subject. Students are also prone to give up on learning easily because they lack understanding of the subject.

We are solving these problems by helping the students who are struggling to prepare themselves for their upcoming exams and further increase their understanding of the subject.

Participants Demographics:

We recruited 10 weakest Form 4 students from SMK Padang Kemunting as mentees (8 girls, 2 boys) Their level of engagrmrnt was around 87%; they were passive at first but eventually became more active.

Project Impact & Impact Measurement Method:

We use pre-test and post-test for both our mentor immersion program and workshop. We asked our particular similar questions in both tests to track their improvements after the program.

We also launched a survey about our website via Google form to find out what our participant’s think and feel about our website.

After our participants had gone through the program and answered the post-test questions, we noticed that there was a 70% (5.5/6 score average) increase in academic performance.

These tests are based on a mixture of Chemistry subject questions and personal questions to identify where they are weak at.

Changes Observed In Participants (Improvements/Progress):

At first, most of them were passive and quiet, but when one of them broke the ice the others began to follow suit. They became more open to us when they saw one of their friends asking us questions. This made us so happy because it shows that they are actually not passive, they just needed someone to break the tension between us and them.

What we have observed as our project progressed was that our participants had become more interested to learn compared to when we first saw them. They also started to ask more questions about the parts where they didn’t understand instead of keeping it to themselves.

We initially thought that the participants wouldn’t be as fun and energetic as they were when we first met them. It was quite a surprise when they answered all our questions with confidence correctly.

Other than that, they also brightened up the atmosphere by making jokes at good times and clapping their hands, and supporting their friends when we had a game session. Honestly, that was unexpected and made them a lot more comfortable around us and closer to each other. These changes are positively affecting our outcome, which is to attract and implement the interest for Chemistry by learning with friends.

This has proved that our “from students to students” concept is really eye-opening for students and makes them feel they are not alone in this journey.

Challenges/Setbacks Faced:

One of our challenges was that our proposed schools for this project, MRSM Kuala Terengganu, BRaInS, and SMKA Dato Haji Abbas, were originally rejected by the headmaster, as "their students are already smart".

After some negotiations, we settled on launching our program at SMK Padang Kemunting and SMK Belara. However, this meant that our project had to be put on hold for almost a week, as our topical test was near, and we couldn't allocate time to both study and execute the project. We did not give up and were able to continue on the project right after our test had ended.