Service Learning - Yong En
The program my class and I came up with for service learning had to be done on Zoom and not face to face due to the current pandemic. My classmates and I had to teach the elderly from Yong En Care Centre how to use the HealthHub app on their mobile phones and not everybody in the class was fluent in their mother tongue. I believe the purpose of these programs are to help the elderly become more tech savvy and be more reliant on technology especially during these tough times. Therefore, as an IT student it was still my duty to carry out this program to the best of my ability and help the elderly to be more tech savvy by teaching them the ways to navigate through the HealthHub app to book or check their medical appointments.
On the day of the Zoom meeting, the class and a few representatives from Yong En was doing a short brief before the elderly joined. Right as the elderly joined, the class were split into groups of 4 or 5. The groups were categorised into different mother languages and my team, and I were assigned Mandarin hence the elderly that are fluent in Chinese only was assigned to us. At the start it was chaotic because most of the elderly had not installed the HealthHub app and we had to help them install it and since it was over a zoom call, every elderly who needed help was talking over each other and we could not hear anything audible. After some time, each of us automatically assigned ourselves to a single elderly and I vividly remember myself interacting with Madam He Li Fang throughout the whole session. She was facing issues with installing the app and it took quite a while for me to help her troubleshoot it but once that was done everything else went smoothly. As I was not able to teach her everything about the app, I apologised but not only did she thanked me, but she also mentioned that she enjoyed every second of the session and had learnt many new things. She genuinely seemed like she enjoyed the session and that made the time I spent with her worth it.