Mr Nigel Sim Boon Wei

From Chumbaka (Kuching)

Nominated by Pua Kok Wei

My name is Kok Wei and I have just graduated from SMJK Yoke Kuan Sekinchan. One teacher that I can never forget is definitely Mr. Nigel Sim that have made great impacts on my life as well as the local student community in Sekinchan. He was a teacher from Teach for Malaysia and was assigned to my school when I was form one. Instead of following the regular boring syllabus, he took an extra mile to teach us coding during weekends from an online platform called Hour of Code. He taught us enthusiastically with fun activities which sparked our interests on coding. He always inspired us to observe the problems around us and found solutions innovatively. Soon, with his guidance and assistance, we managed to create our own projects which were ready for the Young Innovate Competition 2015. For me, I have created an automated recycling machine named EcoMan after seeing plenty of trash lying around my school. However, initially we did not have faith to compete with students from the cities. Being non-native English speakers, we found it very challenge to memories different vocabularies and construct our own sentences. Besides, my project EcoMan malfunctioned right before the competition. I was so upset and nervous. Fortunately, Mr. Nigel noticed our problems and showed his support by fixing my project together. He encouraged us that we should always believe ourselves and never gave up. Eventually, two teams made their way into the national finals and my team emerged as the 2nd Runner-up. We were beyond joy because it was the first time we achieved such accomplishment in a national level competition. Soon, our good news spread around the school community and even raised the interests from our school faculties. Mr. Nigel then started a project called Transformasi that allowed students to learn coding, circuitry and robotics. Since then, we have recruited more than 100 students to join this project. Now, even though Mr. Nigel have left our school, the Transformasi Project is still continued by the seniors and will be continued by our juniors as well. To me, the greatest inspiration that Mr. Nigel impacted on me is his dedication in guiding and proving us that even kampong boy can achieve great things. (372 words)