Empire Code Education Blog – Page 3 – Sharing Our Daily Challenges As Educators

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Yesh, I’m Chinese but I can’t speak Mandarin 😅

I CAN’T resist sharing this funny incident, which took place in our centre last week (Eric, forgive me please 😂). Empire Code has a big pool of Mandarin-speaking parents at our Tanglin centre, and the majority of the Education Team is pretty proficient in conversational Mandarin, well, all except Eric.

A bit of background about our Head Of Operations: he is Chinese, looks Chinese, and his parents migrated from Hong Kong 🇭🇰 to Sweden 🇸🇪 before he was born. As a result, our dear Eric can speak fluent Swedish, English, and Cantonese and a smattering of Thai. He claims he’s fluent in Thai after spending a few years living in Bangkok, but we all know his 8-year-old Em is way better in Thai than he is 🤣.

So, last Friday (which was no different from any other Fridays), Eric happened to be in the Empire Code Tanglin centre, taking a zoom call with Jasmine about our centre’s relocation. Then, a Chinese parent walks in, sees Eric and naturally starts speaking to him in Mandarin (as he looks Chinese after all). However, the only Mandarin words Eric can say is his name. However, to give credit to Eric, he was able to think quickly on his feet, and he promptly rotated his laptop 💻 to face the parent, so that Jasmine could converse with the parent in Mandarin via Zoom. As he found the entire situation hilarious, he even took a photo of the conversation! 

The entire team had a good laugh about this, and Eric loudly proclaimed that he will start attending Mandarin classes again. So next time you meet Eric, please speak to him in Mandarin, but don’t say you read about it here!  

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I am famous! Well, almost…

What’s a side perk of owning a Computer Science school? We get to go on national TV 📺! 

In mid-November, I received an email from a deputy editor at Mediacorp, asking to do a 7-minute feature with Empire Code which would be aired on Channel 8 Chinese news. The theme is about the emerging trends of computer science workshops for children and teenagers. Mediacorp would like to interview the manager 🙋🏻‍♀️, 1 of our trainers, and a parent-child pair. 

We were obviously over the moon🌙 to be featured by the largest media company in Singapore! Firstly, I had to fix a filming day with Mediacorp. I asked for an extra week to prepare as I had to call all the parents of our Minecraft coding camps to obtain their consent for their children’s media to be featured on Channel 8. Concurrently, we began approaching our camp parents, enquiring if they would like to be interviewed with their children as part of the feature. Surprisingly, this proved to be the most challenging! Most parents gladly volunteered their children to be interviewed; however, almost all of them were too shy themselves to appear in front of national tv. 😳😲

Thankfully, after MUCH cajoling, we managed to find two parent-child pairs for the interview. The biggest challenge for all interviewees stemmed from the requirement that all the interviews had to be conducted in Mandarin. Though I did Higher Chinese in Chung Cheng High, it has been a few decades (yes, I am that old 🤣) since I read any essays/news/documents in Mandarin….Honestly, my only exposure to the language since Junior College involves making online purchases on Taobao 🤣🤣

There was a very interesting question raised, enquiring if courses revolving around the Metaverse concept is getting popular amongst parents and students. The simple answer is: Many parents have heard of the word but in terms of truly understanding its meaning and wanting to sign up for a Metaverse-related course for their children, is a different story altogether.   

All in all, I am glad to say everyone had fun!! A big thank you to Mediacorp’s Channel 8 for doing a feature about our Roblox and Minecraft coding classes and our views about Metaverse!

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My Life’s Good Till The Wifi’s Down

Can you imagine a life without wifi? Well, I absolutely can’t, especially when Work From Home (WFH) became the default arrangement in 2020 when Covid entered our lives. Nothing makes me edgier than when the wifi is down at our Tanglin centre. Why? Because Empire Code is a Computer Science school and our most popular courses are entirely wifi-dependent. 

Our broadband provider at our Tanglin centre is Starhub and honestly, the amount we have to pay for corporate wifi is simply eye-popping😵‍💫. And yet there are too-many-for-my-liking outages that have occurred in the past 3 years. Most times, the wifi just dropped suddenly during our busiest periods and all classes were at a standstill for the 10 minutes during which the router was restarting. The worst part is there are multiple reasons for that and trying to identify the problem is like finding a needle in a haystack. There was one incident when we had 0️⃣ wifi for a good hour. Thank god for the shakeup of our local telco industry 5 years ago, all our trainers have a generous supply of mobile data to share with our students and that allowed us to survive the broadband outage.

My home wifi operator coincidentally is also Starhub (I need to learn my lesson and not put all my eggs in one basket) and I’ve been experiencing painfully slow wifi speed for a few weeks. After a few complaints to Starhub, the technician patiently (and I impatiently) endured a few speed tests and concluded that the main reason is due to my Nokia beacon instead. Next, came a few days of liaising with Nokia support and various testings. It seemed to be mostly resolved after I reset the router, but I still do get pathetic wifi speeds of 30mbps occasionally.

I can understand why it’s advisable to sign up with 2 different wifi operators at Empire Code centres, but gosh the cost of that 💸💸💸 Do share with me your worst wifi incident as well!

P.S. The only fun part about my home wifi fiasco is reading my chat transcript with Nokia Support and realising what the technical is seeing (see transcript below) 🤣🤪

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Did I Just Outsource My Dating Life?

Outsourcing – such a scary word if you are a current employee in an MNC; BUT I’m a big believer in outsourcing. In fact, that’s how my entire banking 🏦 career started. I was the first batch of finance professionals at Credit Suisse, and we were the outsourced support for our New York and London offices. Barely 2 months into the job, my boss offered me the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do a secondment to the London office. I was given one year to learn all the tasks currently performed by a team based in London, and move that entire team function back to Singapore.

Fast forward, 5 years later, I moved back to Singapore and started with a different bank. This time, I was given a team of 5 professionals to train who would eventually take over parts of my team function, when they move back to Pune to be the outsourced support for the Singapore team.

Now that I have embarked on my entrepreneurial journey with Empire Code, time is a rare commodity for me. Whenever a friend asks about my dating life, my answer is  – Hey! I don’t even have enough time to have proper sleep!” Also, I am NOT a fan of online dating, due to the initial oh-so-awkward (and painful) first conversations, which makes my options extremely limited, since Covid has placed a handbrake on most social interactions.

Well, the universe must have heard my distress (but more likely, my mom’s AND my grandma’s prayers) and dropped the perfect experiment on my lap. Why not outsource my dating life?? My secret cupid 💘 would save my time by sifting through potential profiles, and I get to avoid the cringy small chats. Guess it’s worth a try?!? 🤷🏻‍♀️ Since Tim Ferris is doing it too…

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A Higher Form Of Realty Reality

Have you worked with agents before? They come in all shapes and forms, but most of us in Singapore are probably more acquainted with insurance and property agents.

Whether I am searching for a residential property for myself or commercial property for Empire Code, my experience overall has been less than delightful (to put it nicely). Writing this article brings back memories of my worst experience so far – my agent in London lied to me to close a deal, and I was nearly left homeless for a week! And this was during the winter 🥶 months!! Thank God my previous landlord was kind enough to extend my lease by a week…Otherwise, I would have had an exciting experience of living under London Bridge 🌉

Back to the present, for the past six months, I have been scouting for a bigger space for Empire Code Education and have dealt with countless agents for multiple locations. Let me share a few encounters I had. Mr B was super responsive initially and went MIA once my agent contacted him for a viewing though I was very open and upfront right from the start that I have my agent to represent my interest. 🤯 Another incident involved a friend of mine who runs a centre too. She has a terrible leakage issue with their ceiling and even rat problems. As a result of the renovation work required to fix the problems, she requested a discount on her monthly rental. The agent agreed to the discount but immediately started asking centres around her (like me!) if they would like to take over her unit instead. Pardon my language, but what an a** 🤯🤯

Of course, not all agents are similar; in fact, I have property agent friends who are honest and patient. Thankfully, we are just about to finalise a deal for a bigger unit for Empire Code Education, and an additional one that is even bigger for April. So hopefully I will not have to deal with any more property agents for awhile 🤞🏻

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I Have A Plan, A Donut Plan

Resourcing is a big challenge and a major source of frustration for small enterprises like Empire Code. It is especially so when we are operating in a niche market such as Computer Science education.

When my co-founder Jasmine and I started Empire Code, our primary aim was (and still is) to make Computer Science education affordable and accessible to all. We are able to provide quality and highly engaging education for our students, whilst ensuring class fees are 30-40% lower than the existing coding schools. To operate sustainably in Singapore – a high-rent and high-wage country, we were required to run a rather lean operation.

In Singapore, I have a strong core team of 4 full-time teachers and we tap on an additional pool of our own 10 highly trained teachers who only come in for our busy periods such as weekends and school holidays. (P.S. in my perfect world, all my full-timers would work 7 days a week, but then, they would probably quit on me en-masse 😝) Can you imagine my distress when one of our weekend teachers informed us with just 2 days’ notice that she was not available to work on the Saturday she was booked in for?? Wait, it gets better. While we were scrambling to look for a backup, ANOTHER teacher cancelled on us on the same day.

Thank God we averted a disaster in the end. The two weekend teachers knew they would get into trouble with me 👿 and agreed to come in to teach for half a day. PHEW! To prevent such situations in the future, I have a plan. All “offending” weekend teachers have to contribute $$ to a kitty for each last-minute cancellation to ‘compensate’ the rest of the team with donuts 🍩🍩🍩! What do you think? Leave me a comment please!

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The Urgent Call From The School Teacher

empire code at catholic high school teaching micro:bit

I don’t often receive urgent calls from a school teacher so early in the morning, but I did get one from a Catholic High School (CHS) teacher. 

Let me digress with a brief background of the events leading up to the call.

Over the past 2 days, six of our Empire Code Education trainers have been conducting micro:bit & science workshops for Primary 3 pupils at CHS, using what we call a “Hybrid classroom” mode. What’s this? It involves one trainer teaching via Zoom with another trainer assisting the pupils in the classroom. This was in place due to the priority of CHS management and staff to protect their students from Covid-19. Yes, it’s “thanks” to Covid 🦠🦠 again! The hybrid classroom would keep pupils safe, by minimizing their contact with external instructors, and understandably so, the safety of our own Empire Code students is top on our priority list too!

Don’t get me wrong. Our team has conducted MULTIPLE successful sessions using both online and hybrid classroom modes since the pandemic. The coding workshops at CHS are different and consist mainly of challenging science experiments. Thus, students require more attention and hands-on involvement from our trainers. For example, students have to test which material enables a micro:bit car to move at the fastest speed. The pupils get to create their own encryption device from scratch! How I wish I were a student again…

CHS school teachers have tried their best to help and we truly appreciate that, but there are limits to how much they can help since they are unfamiliar with the micro:bit coding platform: Microsoft Makecode.

After two days of intense pressure on both trainers and teachers of CHS (which tested our capacities to adapt), I am super relieved (as are all parties involved) to hear that the school principal has agreed to make an exception for our workshops, and allow all our trainers to be physically present in classrooms moving forwards.  🙏🏻🙏🏻

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