2017.02.13

Lunch Cost: HKD300 

About the Speaker:

Dr. Bill TSANG is currently the Director of Research at Youth Global Network where he conducts action research among disadvantaged youth in Hong Kong and China in the area of education and migration.  He is also an Honorary Research Associate at the Wah Ching Centre of Research on Education in China at The University of Hong Kong.  Prior to that, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Social Work at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.  Bill received his doctorate in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University.  Bill worked as a software engineer for 6 years in Boston’s hi-tech industry before becoming a counseling psychologist (Boston & HK) for more than 20 years.  For the past 12 years, he has been working on poverty alleviation among migrant children in Shanghai and Beijing.  His current research and development project in Shenzhen and Hong Kong is to use technology and education to bridge the digital divide for disadvantaged youth, breaking intergenerational poverty through better schooling and greater employment opportunities.  He also runs a global leadership program with partners in Africa, India and Cambodia, and an asylum seeker integration program in Hong Kong.

Introducing PROJECT-C: Creative Coding for Change

On Digital Literacy & Social Integration

Research has shown that the 30 million migrant children in China perform worse than their urban counterparts.  At the same time, Hong Kong has 18% of its children living below the poverty line, especially among its ethnic minorities.  These disadvantaged children lag behind the middle-class and elite children in many areas, particularly in education.  They are also the digital have-nots who are at risk of being left behind in the 21^st century technology economy. 

As the world drives towards STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education, the digital divide between disadvantaged children and the rest widens.  Youth Global Network has started a research and development project aiming to narrow this gap.  We are developing a self-learning curriculum that uses adaptive learning technologies coupled with gamification strategies to optimize individual learning for students with low confidence, low motivation and zero programming skills.  The goal is to level the playing field for all students so that the underprivileged can have the resources to learn to program, gain more access to technology education and have better employment skills.  Parallel to skill development, we also have a mentoring scheme to develop the life and character of the disadvantaged youth, to provide them with the network and support for their future, bridging the social divide.