After a two-week journey to traditional craft villages in Quang Nam, lecturers and students from Singapore Polytechnic and DTU held a display of their experiences at the “Gallery of Learning Express” exhibition to demonstrate their accomplishments during the trip at the DTU library on the afternoon of April 10th.
Students of Singapore Polytechnic and DTU demonstrating a Learning Express model
At Tam Thanh and Tam Ky in Quang Nam Province, the students and lecturers of SP and DTU learnt about making fish sauce, raising freshwater shrimp and weaving sleeping-mats. They tried to discover the difficulties the villagers were facing, working conditions, labor safety and others. Then they researched ways of helping the villagers improve their productivity. Many ideas about smart devices and equipment to improve production were on display at the exhibition.
Participants were awarded certificates by representatives from DTU and SP
Seeing how the people of the sedge village harvest sedge with a sickle, which easily leads to labor accidents, the students had the idea of a specialized type of sedge shears, both convenient and safe. They furthermore created a model smart drying rig. Having many such rigs would allow to dry a lot of sedge simultaneously and to increase sedge quality compared to drying it on the ground. The rigs would furthermore come with wheels, allowing to very conveniently bring them inside when it gets dark or rainy. In parallel with this, their ideas did not stop at traditional sedge mat production, but also at making mini mats and other decorative products made from sedge, or at instructing customers in how to draw their favorite patterns on the mats, not only increasing the productivity of the craft village but also boosting local tourism.
For the shrimp village, the toughest problem is saving on electricity costs for farming. Currently, each household spends about 80 or 100 million VND per year on electricity. After a careful analysis of the facts and thorough discussions, the students from the two schools came up with the idea to create an electricity model using solar energy. Each household would have a solar panel, and the energy harvested by it would be sent to a voltage stabilizer to avoid trouble with the electricity. According to their computations, using solar energy would allow saving 43% off electricity costs.
Eunice Kong Siu Chi, a student of Biotechnology at SP, said: “The field trip into the craft villages in Vietnam with DTU was very interesting and meaningful to me. I had wonderful experiences there and a great opportunity to improve my knowledge & skills and learnt about the culture of Vietnam and make friends with DTU students. By taking part in Learning Express, I learnt how to conduct a project using the Design Thinking methodology. Hopefully, I will have more chances to return to Danang and visit some craft villages to discover the difficulties the villagers were facing and provide them with innovative ideas to increase their productivity.”
(Media Center)