Did you know that Sir Stamford Raffles founded the first formal school in Singapore, called Singapore Institution, in 1823? That the bilingualism policy in schools was officially introduced in 1960? Or that English was officially designated the first language within the local education system in 1987?

Presenting these nuggets of facts about Singapore’s educational milestones in an informative and visually appealing way was the brainchild of four alumni from the SMU School of Information Systems (SIS).

In addition, the team, called Educity and made up of Joel Lee, Michael Xu, Wong De Ming and Thia Kai Xin, also created interactive graphs showcasing some insightful education metrics of Public Service Commission (PSC) Scholarships and scholars, having been inspired by recent discussions on scholars in Parliament, and an article in local Chinese daily Lianhe Zaobao about President’s Scholars taking soft-skill subjects. 

Organized by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) and held in Singapore for the first time, the competition, called ‘Data in the City Visualisation Challenge’, attracted 28 teams which told their Singapore story using Open Data from data.gov.sg or OneMap. Ten teams made it to the finals held at ArtScience Museum at Marina Bay Sands on 31 October 2014.

Educity walked away with $4000 for clinching the second spot in the competition.

Sharing on why the team chose Education as their theme, Joel Lee said “As we are recent graduates, we feel that the Singapore Education System is a topic that is relatable to us. We wanted to showcase how the system of awarding scholarships to the brightest students and subsequently having them serve in the Government has had an important impact on the development of Singapore. Our project also showed how the education system has been successful in preparing students of all races in Singapore.”

Added Wong De Ming, “The competition was fun for us as it was the first project we did together after graduating from SMU. Through working on this project, we also appreciate how much we have benefited from Singapore's education system, gained insights from the PSC scholarship data, and gained exposure to data visualisation tools.”

Data visualization is effective and powerful in communicating knowledge and insights by applying and analyzing vast amount of raw data into a visual context. This helps people make better informed decisions. 

To find out more about Educity's winning visualization piece, please visit: http://www.educity.sg/

[Photo: (L to R) SIS alumni Joel Lee, Michael Xu, Wong De Ming, and Thia Kai Xin received their prize from Guest-of-Honour Mr Zaqy Mohamad (centre), Chairman of Government Parliamentary Committee for Communications and Information.](Photo: IDA)