Mosti to respond to talented individuals
KUCHING: Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (Mosti) will come up with a mechanism to respond to talented individuals for enhanced human capital development in Malaysia.
Its Minister Datuk Seri Panglima Madius Tangau said Malaysia had to move forward with its science and technology industry to achieve high income economy status by Year 2020.
He said of late, Mosti had come across a talented secondary school student who invented a special medical device that read the pulse, among others.
“A Form 4 student from Sarikei by the name of Edison develops a special device and we want more people like him to come forward. At Mosti, we will have the necessary mechanism to respond to talented people positively.
“The inventor of the pen drive is a Malaysian, but he brought his invention to Taiwan just because we were not able to give him the necessary support as we could not understand science and technology,” he said when launching the statelevel Creativity and Science4U Carnival 2016 at Kuching Civic Centre here yesterday.
Madius pointed out that it was high time to cultivate Higher Order
A Form 4 student from Sarikei by the name of Edison develops a special device and we want more people like him to come forward. At Mosti, we will have the necessary mechanism to respond to talented people positively.
Thinking Skills ( Hots) among young Malaysians, particularly those in secondary schools.
He said gone were the days when students memorised knowledge and information from textbooks, especially now that the government had implemented the National Science, Technology and Innovation Agenda.
“We need to have a new culture, the Hots culture. We want creative-thinking people who are interested in science, technology and innovation.”
At a press conference later, Madius said 20 per cent of secondary school students in Malaysia were in the science stream although the country’s target was 60 per cent by year 2020.
“We still have four years to meet the objective,” he said, adding that Mosti would collaborate with the Ministry of Education towards this end.
He was glad to note that almost 70 per cent of engineering students in local universities are female.
He said Yayasan Innovasi Malaysia, an agency under Mosti, would strive to produce the science outlook – like what Bank Negara Malaysia does for the country’s economic outlook - on an annual basis to monitor the development.
“At the moment, the science outlook is done once in every two years. We hope this can be done every year.”
Meanwhile, the carnival yesterday was the first leg of Mosti’s series of programmes to be held throughout the country.
After Sarawak, a similar event will be brought to the southern zone ( Negeri Sembilan, Johor and Malacca), northern zone ( Perlis, Kedah, Penang and Perak), central zone ( Kuala Lumpur Federal Territory and Putrajaya), and eastern zone ( Kelantan, Terengganu and Pahang) before concluding in Sabah.
Among those present were State Secretary Datuk Amar Mohd Morshidi Abdul Ghani and Assistant Minister for Community Services Datuk Peter Nansian Ngusie.
Datuk Seri Panglima Madius Tangau, Science, Technology and Innovation Minister