Saradise hosts Nextsparks Junior Innovate 2018 competition for south zone

KUCHING: Saradise yesterday hosted the Nextsparks Junior Innovate 2018 Competition for Sarawak’s southern zone which was held at the Saradise Innovation Space and attracted a total of 120 primary school students from 18 schools in Kuching, Padawan and Kota Samarahan.

The competition was jointly organised by Saradise Innovation Sdn Bhd and Chumbaka with the aim of inspiring digital creative mindset and to provide life skills to primary school students in moving forward into the digital world. This competition is also part of Saradise Innovation’s initiative, NextSparks.

Group chief executive officer of Saradise, Datuk Chris Chung, said the Saradise Innovation Space was set up with the purpose of providing a platform to nurture latest thinking in innovation which represents the creative Sarawak identity and to bring Sarawakians together.

He added that NextSparks has achieved Saradise’s vision of unifying Sarawak identity, ecology, arts and innovation.

Meanwhile, Nigel Sim from Chumbaka told reporters that the organisers had been rolling out this competition since May this year.

A two- day train- the- teachers session was conducted where 40 teachers and two parents were taught basic coding and physical computing which are essential for digital teaching skills. The teachers were then tasked to train students to take part in this Nextsparks Junior Innovate Competition.

Besides playing hosts for this event, Saradise has donated a total of 50 sets of Arduino Learning Kits to the participating schools in order to make this competition a success.

Chung was happy that this Nextsparks Junior Innovate 2018 competition for Sarawak’s southern zone had received good support from the primary schools in Kuching, Padawan and Kota Samarahan.

He hopes that this competition has generated much interest and awareness of the importance of nurturing and gearing children towards digital economy.

He is confident that young innovators will be able to go far and do their part in contributing to the society. A total of eight teams from this competition qualified for the final round in the state- level competition, where they will compete with another eight teams from Sibu and Miri.

The state-level competition is to be held on October 6 at Saradise Innovation Space. Winners from the state- level competition will participate in the national finals which will be held in Penang from this Nov 10-11 in conjunction with the Penang International Science Fair 2018.

Among those present at the competition were the deputy permanent secretary of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Research Dr Abdul Rahman Deen and Dr Khairul Hafiz Sharkawi from the Sarawak Multimedia Authority.

Saradise Innovation Sdn Bhd is situated at Level 2 Block A2 of Saradise Kuching. It is currently running free trial classes for students. For more information on these classes, the coordinator, Andy Chong, can be contacted at andy.chong@ saradise.my