Two weeks after joining SP, I saw an email about the “LTA Car-Lite Challenge”. I was intrigued and decided to find out more. It was a school-level project challenge requiring a team of 2 to 4 SP students. I instantly thought of my secondary school friends, William, Ying Da, and Izekkious who are now also studying at SP. Our team name was “Student Sustainable Polytechnic Promoters” (SSPP). We tried hard to force “SP” into our team acronym. Ha!
About LTA’s Car-Lite initiative
LTA wants students from JCs, Polytechnics and ITEs to champion the car-lite movement among their peers to encourage more ground-up creativity and active green citizenry amongst youths. Hence, they created the Car-lite initiative targeted at students.
2023’s Car-lite Challenge theme was ‘Promoting a Car-lite Lifestyle’. Our team discussed and decided on the sub-theme of nudging behaviors. Instead of just creating awareness of Car-lite amongst SP students, we aimed for a more ambitious target of encouraging both SP staff and students to switch to active mobility options.
Car-lite Challenge Proposal “Walking the extra mile”
Our team worked on the idea of active mobility gamification where students & teachers are encouraged to climb stairs and go the extra distance literally. This will help boost the health of SP students and staff. Hence, our concept was “Walking the extra mile” and we intended to gamify it using the BLAP approach we found while doing secondary research.
Badges
Levels & leaderboards
Achievements
Points
Our team intended to design digital badges, create different levels, and display the progress of different teams via an online leaderboard. Various types of achievements would each reap different points. E.g. roping in teachers into students' team would gain extra points as it fosters a stronger bond between students and teachers. Participating teams’ scores are displayed on a leaderboard that is refreshed weekly. This plays on the FOMO feeling and encourages friendly competition among fellow SP staff and students. To entice higher participation, students can get CCA points as well as digital badges displayed in their personal profiles under SP's mobile app.
Unfortunately, our idea was not approved. It was deemed too large scale. So my team pivoted to a less ambitious proposal to raise awareness of Car-lite via an infographics poster design competition instead.
Car-lite Challenge Proposal “Create an infographic”
Our new plan was to invite SP students to submit their designs on promoting a Car-lite lifestyle. To evaluate if students' awareness on Car-lite has increased, we would create quizzes that participants must complete - before & after their poster submissions. We would also have to create a scoring rubric for fair assessment of the submissions, come up with rules, timelines and deadlines for submission as well as plan the logistics involved with publicity blitz, sending reminders, etc. After identifying the different steps involved in running this project, we grouped them into 4 major categories (see below). Although the various tasks are not to be done in sequence, it gave us a structure to follow. Internally, each team member also knew what they had been assigned so that workload can be better managed.
Design
Create Rules of the competition
Plan Incentives for participants
Create a Scoring rubric
Create a sample infographic
Implementation
Set deadline
Plan Publicity
Create a Microsoft form to collect submissions
Create a padlet to showcase submissions
Reply queries from participants
Provide monthly progress updates
Measuring before & after
Design Quiz questions
Administer Quiz
Analyse Quiz results
Publicity
Send Email blast
Administer Telegram channel
After listing out all the steps involved in our new project, I finally understood why our teachers rejected our initial plan. If even our smaller-scale “infographic” proposal was already looking so tedious, our initial ”walk the extra mile” project would not have survived. It's fortunate that my team received guidance from Ms. Christina Sho (Ms. Sho), our teacher-mentor who helped evaluate the feasibility of our proposals.
Design & Implementation
After we drafted the email and mass-sent it to the whole school, sign-ups started coming in on the first day itself! Eventually, we received 50 sign-ups. A telegram group chat was created to serve as our main communication platform. This gave the participants a way to receive updates as well as pose any queries. The participants were given one month to submit their infographics. We eventually received a total of 23 designs.
Before the email blast, the team debated on how should we go about evaluating the entries fairly. So, we designed a rubric together, by building off an existing template from Studocu. We made sure to only evaluate the entries after all were submitted and to do it together at the same time. This was done to reduce bias. With the established rubric on hand, it was easy to identify the top 3 winners.
Evaluation
To measure some form of impact, we made all participants do a quiz before & after their submissions. To not make it too onerous, we limited the quiz to only 10 questions. The topics covered include public transportation benefits and greenhouse gas emissions. My team analyzed the results of the quizzes and found a 5% improvement in scores. However, I felt that it would be much better if we could get LTA subject matter experts to create the questions instead. After all, my team were all merely year 1 students with a limited understanding of Car-lite based on our secondary research.
Fast forward 3 months, and our project was progressing steadily. We did lose some numbers, as some students who signed up dropped out. Nonetheless, we continued to provide clear communication and instructions for the remaining 23 participants.
To wrap up the project, the team created a slide deck to present our project findings to the teacher in charge, Ms. Christina Sho, as well as to our client, LTA. Unfortunately, LTA was not able to meet us and we were only able to share our presentation to Ms Sho.
I came up with the structure of our final presentation. We were going to tell our story of what we did well, what could have been done better, and what’s planned next. Each of us would helm a different section. As we worked on this, I created a padlet to consolidate all the entries. This would allow LTA to have an easy way to view all the different designs in one place.
Should LTA like our project, we also pre-empted by creating some publicity materials for LTA to upload to their existing social media channels. So, our team created a 30-second short-form video that showcases the winning entries.
Follow-up in 2024… maybe?
Lastly, we included a follow-up project for next year’s Car-lite challenge. It's scaled up to an inter-polytechnic collaboration, and riding on the hype of Gen-AI. Specifically, our team proposed to do research and upskill ourselves before conducting a workshop to transfer the skills of how to use Gen-AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Dall-e, etc. to create visuals, and storyboard as well as short videos using text-to-video prompting. We felt that a short and engaging video would be so much more interesting than a static infographic. The winning entries can then be shared via LTA’s social media platforms.
Final presentation & mentor’s feedback
Ms Sho was quite pleased with how we handled our project and suggested putting our short video on the SP Environmentalist Club’s social media for more students to be educated on Car-lite. She liked how we planned ahead but cautioned us on the difficulty of collaborating with other polytechnics due to differing rules and regulations. Nevertheless, she still complimented our efforts and approved our request to award CCA points to students who participated in our project.
This LTA Car-Lite Challenge 2023 taught me many valuable lessons. Despite my best efforts to plan, my team still faced setbacks. There were some miscommunications and bickering. However, I had to be firm and try to lead by example. As a result, there were many late nights when I had to juggle school work, and this project as well as anxious parents arguing why I was up so late so often. However, as I reflect upon my journey, I have no regrets. I gained new experiences in leadership, communication, and collaboration. Would I do it all over again? You bet!
Howie Chia
23 October 2023
TLDR
Participating in the LTA Car-Lite Challenge 2023 gave me new insights into project management, leadership, communication, & collaboration.
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