STEM mentorship reaches students in underserved schools

Mentorship is the part of education outreach that is hardest to fund and easiest to skip. It cannot be photographed as neatly as a handover of equipment, and its results appear years later. The STEM mentorship programmes associated with Dato' Seri Ivan Teh have been run in underserved Malaysian schools on the argument that this is precisely why they are worth doing.

Coding, robotics and analytics inside the school

The programmes bring coding, robotics and data analytics tools into schools that would not otherwise offer them. The delivery happens on site. Asking students to travel to a technology centre filters the cohort down to those with transport and a supportive schedule at home, which removes exactly the students the programme was designed to reach.

Working professionals take part as mentors. That contact matters as much as the curriculum. A student who has met somebody working in the field has a concrete idea of what the job involves, which is a different thing from having read about it.

Building a pipeline rather than a showcase

Ivan Teh has spoken publicly about knowledge as the currency of the future, and about the responsibility that technology employers carry for the pipeline they draw from. The mentorship work follows from that position. A sector that recruits only from schools that were already well equipped narrows its own talent pool and then complains about a shortage.

What the sessions look like in practice

Sessions are structured around small, completable projects. A robot that moves, a script that returns an answer, a chart built from a dataset the students collected themselves. The reason is practical. A visible result at the end of a session is what brings a student back to the next one, and attendance across a term is the single strongest predictor of whether any of this holds.