Effectiveness of Johor young innovators challenge program on students' interest attitude and career towards stem

Abstract

The purpose of this program is to identify the effectiveness of Johor Young Innovators Challenge program to enhance UTM undergraduate students' interest, attitude and career towards STEM. Johor Young Innovators Challenge 2017 was successfully completed within the proposed project period. The programme started with the ongoing road shows and boot camps to the selected 15 schools between February to April. Road show and boot camp were delivered in the schools for groups of between 20-40 students. The roadshow and boot camp were aimed at creating awareness and as a platform for the organizing committee to work with teacher in-charge in identifying talented individuals for the Young Innovators team challenge. On March 3 to 5, the UTM mentors had to go through a compulsory mentor training. The training covered not only the technical aspect of the competition but was largely focused on mentoring and leadership skills and the application of Design Thinking in project development. UTM undergraduate mentors gained insights into eeective mentoring, communication skills, pitching skills, critical and creative thinking, and most importantly gained the know-how to mentor project using Design Thinking. With training completed, mentor were assigned to the schools and had the responsibility of mentoring the schools' teams in their project and completion of prototype before the Johor competition date 15 July 2017. Aer an average of 8 mentoring meets ups (both face to face and virtually) with school teams, a total of 67 teams completed their prototype and participated in Johor Young Innovators Challenge which took place at Dewan Banquet, UTM on 15 July 2017. Johor Young Innovators Challenge participated by 199 students from 22 schools in Johor district. There were 67 teams enter the JYIC competition ended with 3 winning teams, 4 Gold award recipients, 7 Silver award recipients and 7 Bronze award recipients. The winner for gold awards are SMK Austin, SMK Puteri Wangsa, SMK Kangkar Pulai and SMK Bandar Baru Uda. In conclusion, mentor should have the following characteristics in order to inspire and generate school students interest towards STEM. There were understand mentees' background; assess mentees' capability; get funding for mentees; appreciate mentees' cooperation; upgrade STEM knowledge among mentees and give feedback about STEM. On the other hand, the good character of mentor in this study was always listen actively during mentoring session.