I was invited for two days to be a resource speaker and project consultant for PROJECT BASiC 4.0 (Boosting and Assessing Skills in Capstone Project Year 4) for STEM High School students of Jose V. Yap National High School in the Philippines.

I started by giving a short talk on what it means to have good design, beyond mere aesthetics, in the context of a STEM research project. As someone who came from a specialized Science High School under the STEM program, I have always wanted to advocate for design awareness and education in the STEM field in the Philippines as design is commonly misunderstood by STEM professionals and laypeople to simply be making things look pretty.

Through this experience, I was able to impart what design means, focusing not only on making things that seem cool through the use of robotics, but rather carefully understanding what problem a group is trying to solve, and what possible variety of solutions could be accomplished to respond to the problem at hand.