Community Service

Overseas Trip

Overseas Attachment

About Realize-IT® Initiative

Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s School of InfoComm Technology (ICT) conceptualized the Realize-IT® program in year 2003 and did its first roll-out in year 2004.

The Realize-IT® program is an ICT student development program that allows students to apply their acquired skills and knowledge from their IT training to real-life situations to help the community at large. Through this program, students also acquired the critical social values of responsibility and giving back to society.

The program comprised the various nature of work :

canvassing for donated PCs and peripherals
recycling and refurbishing of used PCs for use by needy organizations
conducting basic IT workshops & training to those who may have been left behind in the IT evolution
providing IT services such as PC and laptop trouble-shooting and repair, set-up and configuring of LAN and web-site development for needy organizations.

Some Instances of Realize-IT®

Clementi-Online Web-Pages for Hawkers and Retailers – 01 Jun 2004 to 28 Nov 2004

Housing estate hawkers and retailers have lesser take-home revenue and are less likely to be able to develop web-pages to promote and publicize their businesses. About 310 students from Dip IT, MMC, IT(MBC) and BIT participated in this Realize-IT® program to develop web-sites for seventy retailers and hawkers over the semester of Jun to Nov 2004. The process required the students to work closely with the hawkers and retailers to better understand their businesses and problems that they encountered. The web-sites were eventually developed and delivered to the Clementi Community Club to be consolidated into the Clementi-Online Portal (COL). The Club’s objective is to develop Clementi into an IT hub and boost IT literarcy and PC owenership amongst its community. Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam launched the COL portal with all the web-sites on 28 November 2004.

Clementi Community Club PC Refurbishing for the Needy – 02-04 Dec 2004

A team of twelve ICT students salvaged and refurbished used PCs for the Clementi Community Club eClub for use by the needy residents in Clementi town from 2nd to 4th December 2004. The team salvaged, refurbished and restored 46 PCs to good working condition from a set of 99 old PCs through a process of diagnosis, repair, refitting and reconfiguring. The salvaged PCs were then installed with Linux operating system and Open Office.

Ngee Ann’s First YEP trip to India - 12 Nov-02 Dec 2004

An ICT team of twenty-five students led by staff members went on the first Ngee Ann SIF YEP (Singapore International Foundation Youth Expedition Program) trip to Calcutta, India on 12Nov-02Dec 2004 to provide the street children with IT exposure. We are also the first community service team to do a service project at a government home. The team worked with an Indian Non-Government Organization - Prajaak to bring 6 used PCs to their home in Barasat, on the outskirts of Calcutta. The PCs were refurbished, networked up on a local area network to be used as a laboratory for teaching IT. The team canvassed Microsoft to provide sponsorship of Microsoft Office software for installation on the PCs. The students also prepared IT courses on basic PC care and maintenance and Microsoft Office processing skills and taught a group of twenty-one children belonging to the home. The trip had provided the students invaluable opportunities for cultural exchange and experiential learning in addition to helping the less privileged overseas.

StrITsmart TM Cyber-Safety Workshop cum Mobile Race @e-Garage® (19 Dec 2005)

Together with Microsoft Singapore, ICT organized the StrITsmartTM Cyber-Safety Workshop cum Mobile Race to educate the less privileged children on the potential dangers lurking around on the Internet and how to surf the Internet more safely. A cyber-safety workshop was given followed by a fun exciting mobile quiz where the students roamed around the polytechnic in search for questions pertaining to cyber-safety and answered the questions from the knowledge they gained from the workshop. More than 80 children from 4 different homes - Chen Su Lan Home, Children’s Aid Society, Darul Insan Orphanage and Jamiyah attended this fun-filled event. More than 120 ICT students as well as ICT and Microsoft management and staff helped out in the event.