Breaking Boundaries: Maximising Growth in Technology and Innovation
by Alisa Haoken
About Alisa
Alisa Haoken is a SWA tenth-grader. Ever since her childhood, she has always been fascinated by the multitude of changes technology has brought about in our lives. She started out fiddling around with little LEGO bricks, and soon attended a robotics centre, where she later learnt to use NXT and EV3 to build and program robots. Over time, the technological fields she was exposed to branched out to: engineering and programming through Arduino; using different programming languages such as Java, Python and C++; and web-design through HTML and CSS. As a result, she soon discovered her passion for technology. In the midst of her journey, she realized the significance of technology in our lives, and is excited whenever she thinks about how it will grow in the future. In her TEDx talk, she shared how to further maximize personal growth by embracing technology, and how it can help change the world. Below are several excerpts from her TEDx talk:
“COVID-19 is one of the most famous global issues of 2020, but it is just one of the countless crises our world faces every single day. Many crises remain unresolved up until today: poverty, hunger, water, and education are four of the many global issues our world is facing, especially for developing countries. Then we have gender equality and rapid environmental declines. The world desperately needs answers to these problems, and fast.”
“The United Nations (UN) created the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to tackle our planet's most urgent problems, using exponential technologies. To achieve these goals, there are small steps that need to be taken, and it's common to fail. It's an open call for innovative ideas to solve some of the world's biggest problems
As WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus said, There are questions we need answers to, and tools we need to be developed as quickly as possible.
Quoting the WHO Director, he mentioned two things: questions & answers and tools to be developed. If we align with the mission that the Sustainable Development Goals has, we can find that we need innovative ideas to get questions & answers, and we need exponential thinking to create tools needed to be developed.”
In addition, Alisa added a third point: building interest & cultivating mindset. She shared her experience from back in 2014 when she and her friends helped underprivileged children gain new experiences and opportunities in the robotic world. Together with her friends, she provided hands-on activities for children to work around and engage with robotics. It helped to build an interest in that field and the next step for them was to provide further STEM activities to further cultivate the children's mindset.
Alisa believes that generating innovative ideas, embracing exponential thinking, and shaping attitudes through mindset cultivating are three important strategies that can be used by humanity to find answers to major global issues that will help create a better future for all.
Watch Alisa’s talk on TEDxYouth@SWA 2020:
