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IMPACT 0562: ENHANCING PEER SUPPORT SYSTEMS IN SCHOOLS

Youth Action Challenge (YAC) is a platform for youth to provide solutions that tackle the issues we are concerned about. Since October 2021, over 80 teams and more than 310 youths have undertaken the YAC Season 3 journey.

Luke Thomas Lim is an 18-year-old student at Temasek Polytechnic studying Applied Artificial Intelligence. He is part of a team that aims to develop a mobile application called You_th, which hopes to empower Singaporean youths to support their peers more effectively in all aspects of life.

Today, he shares more about the project and the work that he does.

What was your role within your YAC project?

I hold one role for this project – the Backend Developer. As the Backend Developer, I oversee the development of the database and functions of our mobile application. In addition to developing the actual product, I am also required to do its maintenance and improvements. I have utilised Visual Studio Code, JavaScript, React Native, and Expo.

What motivated you to join YAC?

Before starting on my YAC journey, I felt that youths going through the education system in Singapore are immensely susceptible to mental health issues due to stressors such as exams and parental pressure. As a person who has experienced many struggles with regard to mental health, I relate to this issue deeply. To alleviate this problem, I teamed up with a group of friends to develop an effective solution in a mobile application.

Could you share with us your experience with your YAC project?

I found the experience with our YAC project to be very fulfilling. I learnt new concepts from the workshops provided by YAC, such as the Theory Of Change, Business Models, and Marketing, which helped propel our project forward in more ways than one. The workshops also guided us on how we should start building the foundation of our project.

With a clear starting line, my team and I pushed ourselves extremely hard for the entire duration of YAC. We had to juggle many school-related commitments and other external projects to produce a worthy enough product to present in front of the judging panel during our Final Open Mic.

After many sleepless nights of doing a mix of administration, programming, designing and discussions, we managed to win a grant for our project, which I am still very proud of up to this day.

What are some challenges you faced while working on your YAC project?

One major problem we faced was developing a specific and valid problem statement. We had to redo our problem statement a total of three times as we felt it was inadequate and didn’t fully encapsulate our project. This resulted in the loss of a significant amount of time which could have been used to further our mobile application instead.

This issue also affected our studies as we had less time to commit towards our schoolwork. However, this was eventually resolved as we dedicated more of our downtime to fulfil all our commitments completely.

Were there any key takeaways or learning points from your time with YAC?

I got to experience many things from YAC, which would usually be unattainable through school projects. Some include the concepts, thought processes, and methodology behind the development of a real-world project meant to aid its consumers. All in all, I absolutely enjoyed my time at YAC.