Service-Learning Project | Mobile App Workshop For The Elderly

zuodan
Jul 24, 2020
4 min read

First Online Workshop Teaching Experience

About a week ago, my classmates and I held a workshop to teach the elderly residents of Radin Mas some basic smartphone usage, as well as how to use e-payments.

Context

For some context, my school, Ngee Ann Polytechnic (NP) has partnered with Radin Mas Community Centre (CC) the past few years to hold such workshops for the elderly. However, due to the restrictions in place amidst the current pandemic, we were unable to hold a face-to-face workshop as our seniors had.

Luckily, after some discussion among ourselves and our mentor, we decided to hold an online workshop instead! As such a thing was almost non-existent (in Singapore) before the Covid-19 period, we did not have much reference to aid us with the planning of the workshop.

Nonetheless, I was eager and excited to step out of my comfort zone to try something new.

Preperation

The preparation started proper around end of April, which was about 2 months before the actual day. After some discussion, we decided on 4 different topics to cover: e-Payments, Basic Smartphone Usage, Digital Photos & Cloud Storage and Social Media. We broke ourselves into 4 groups and got to work preparing the slides. The initial plan was to have 2 big sessions, 1 in English and 1 in Mandarin, so each group had to prepare 2 versions of their slides for each medium!

Fast forward to about a week before the actual day however, we decided to have 12 breakout rooms, 6 in English and 6 in Mandarin instead. Compared to having 2 big sessions with 15+ seniors each, this would make it easier to facilitate each session, with only about 2-3 seniors and 2-3 students per breakout room.

Radin Mas CC had also contacted our mentor to request that we focused on Basic Smartphone Usage and e-Payments, so the other sets of slides weren't used <(￣﹏￣；)

Lucky for me I'd worked on the e-Payments slides :D

Actual Day

The online workshop was hosted on a Zoom meeting on Saturday, July 11th. All the sessions were conducted concurrently using the same sets of slides, and there were allocated times for the participants to ask questions as well. Unfortunately for the session I was conducting, only 1 out of the 3 seniors assigned turned up, presumably because the others didn’t know how to join the Zoom call.

Mr Gan, the only senior in our session, was surprisingly quick to understand the content of the slides, and was able to follow along at the relatively fast pace we were going at. However, he had trouble performing certain gestures using his smartphone, like “press and hold” and “double tap”. Although he commented that it was very hard to receive guidance from me and my partner over the internet, he still seemed very keen on learning whatever we had prepared. He even asked for the softcopy of the slides at the end of the session.

Unfortunately, Mr Gan had not downloaded POSB digibank or PayLah!, which were the e-payment apps that we were covering, so he was unable to follow along as we demonstrated how to perform a PayNow and PayLah! transfer. However, as he requested for the slides at the end of the session, I believe that he will try to follow the instructions and figure it out himself in his own time. He was also able to follow along and pick up certain terms that we used.

A particular interaction we had that stood out to me was when Mr Gan asked us how he could change his home screen wallpaper. After we had failed to guide him due to the restrictions of online teaching and his phone being of a different brand than what we were used to, I told him that changing his wallpaper is actually very simple, and that his children would probably be able to teach him. He then told me that his children actually get frustrated when they try to teach him, which is why he decided to sign up for this workshop.

The fact that someone of his age was so willing to learn even simple digital skills, yet his children couldn’t even spare the time to be patient and teach him was quite saddening. I’d always been teaching my mother and grandmother anything they wanted to learn when it came to digital skills or smartphone usage, so hearing such a thing was heartbreaking. Nonetheless, I feel that it is extremely respectable for Mr Gan to actually go out of his way and try to catch up with the digital world by signing up for this workshop.

Thoughts

All in all, it was actually quite a fun and interesting experience! Although we only had 1 senior in our session, it also meant that we were able to connect more with him.

Here's a picture that we took together! :D

On a separate note, this Service-Learning project has actually prompted me to do some reflection. Seeing how much effort Mr Gan was putting in to learning something that was so foreign to him really inspired me to go and learn something new myself. I've actually been putting off learning some new languages for a while now, telling myself "I can start next time", but that next time never came. Instead of indefinitely putting it off, I should learn from Mr Gan and actually start taking steps towards achieving my goal.

And that concludes my Service-Learning experience in NP! Even though it was only a 1 hour+ session, I've definitely learnt a lot from this project, be it values like striving to achieve my goals, or hard knowledge like what challenges and difficulties seinors have when using a smartphone, which could be used in future when developing systems and apps to appeal to seniors as well.

I am glad that I got the chance to take part in this Service-Learning project, and would definitely recommend others to try it as well! You would likely be able to take away a few things from the experience. :)