Service Learning Mentors

Under our mentor's careful guidance we turned our programming skills into something that gives back to society. We stepped away from our screens to run a "Python Coding Camp" for primary and secondary school students, and felt the satisfaction of mastering programming knowledge and passing it on. We also created "Python fun facts" posts on Instagram, and became fluent with collaboration tools such as GitHub and HackMD. The course not only taught us a great deal, but through sharing out the teamwork and maintaining our environments, deepened our communication skills and sense of social responsibility as future engineers.

Our mentor arranged for us to work with the Sunshine Social Welfare Foundation on an advocacy project for facial equality. With a tight preparation schedule and the exacting demands of working across organisations, the process was honestly full of challenges and pressure. But it was precisely through intensive communication and learning to share the work that we learned to pace ourselves, handle the unexpected, and manage the details of collaborating with an outside non-profit. This demanding, hands-on course showed us why facial equality matters, and how much expertise and patience it takes to advance a public issue — solid learning that was hard going first and rewarding after.

Our mentor set out a range of public issues for us to explore, including food and agricultural education and new immigrants. Working in groups taught me a lot about handling relationships and managing a team, and I also gained a deeper understanding of the state of mother-tongue education in Taiwan. Extending from my own field into cross-disciplinary learning strengthened my major and improved my communication and teamwork. We even had the chance to plan a science camp, learning to prepare lesson plans suited to primary school pupils so as to better meet the needs of those we serve.

With our mentor's step-by-step guidance, we went from group discussions and writing experiments to making our own lesson plans, then travelled to rural primary schools to lead children in hands-on science — and in their bright, focused faces we felt how teaching and learning grow together. Our mentor arranged professional training in lesson preparation and regularly checked our progress with each group. The course also included a thought-provoking talk on algal reef conservation and coral bleaching, and field visits to ecological sites, which greatly broadened our horizons. A full year's commitment not only improved our lesson planning and communication across groups, but brought back the passion that first drew us, as life sciences students, to protecting the natural world.

The course was more challenging than I expected. In an age when we're used to typing on our phones and talking through screens, our mentor took us off campus to do fieldwork, listening face to face to the life stories, joys and sorrows of strangers and niche craftspeople. We spent weekends arranging interviews and filming a documentary, and built an exhibition bit by bit out of group discussions — it took a huge amount of effort and was exhausting. But when we finally saw everyone's interviews presented in full at the exhibition, the sense of fulfilment was irreplaceable. Thank you for showing us the real warmth in society's quiet corners; it's a growing experience I won't forget.