Haji Suhardi bin Haji Suhami
Education Officer, Saiful Rijal Technical College, Brunei Darussalam
Context
Suhardi’s motivation comes from his true passion: technology. His Australian friend gave him a personal challenge to create an innovative multimedia project. His friend argued that Brunei lacks experience in this field. Suhardi then decided to pursue this idea to challenge his status quo. “My biggest challenge is always the time factor,” said Suhardi. He claims that being innovative requires more than just commitment but also being able to reach your goal at the precise time. Suhardi stressed the importance of making critical observations at the earliest stage especially in selecting students for a big project. Innovation Suhardi managed to lead his students what started of from a typical final year project, and ended up winning international competitions. The project is called Brunei Experience Multimedia Project which consist of a touchscreen Kiosk embedded on to a 32” display panel system with a user friendly interface that was created using Adobe Flash software. The project entails mastering a variety of IT skills such as programming, graphic design, video production and mobile application development. This Kiosk aims at giving useful information that features exceptional places for anybody who wants to visit Brunei, especially targeted for all incoming tourist. This Kiosk presents the convenience for a tourist in Brunei who wants to know more about exciting places to visit either for sightseeing purposes, best dining places and all other related information that are updated and not available on the web. During the time when this project was created, it was unique as there were non-or similar application or device that can compete with it or exist in the entire country. All of the content materials incorporated inside this project were developed by him and his team, which started out from ground zero. Impact With a strong focus and endless commitment, Suhardi managed to bring the students to success and help triumphed 9 prestigious awards such as the 2011 Asia Pacific ICT Merits Awards, the 2011 BICTA Champion Awards and also the 2012 BICTA Merit Awards. In 2010, he was awarded as the best project supervisor under Vocational Technical Education Project development under SEAMEO VOCTECH. This gave him great recognition for his work and was recently awarded funding and subsidiaries by the Government to start his own animation company. Suhardi is part of an entrepreneurship group nominated by our AITI (Authority for Info-communications Technology Industry) to assist and support the ICT related industries in Brunei. Respectively, because of his success, he’s recent group of students who won many of the awards are currently all employed either by private or government ICT agencies throughout the country. As a result, many of our new students become highly motivated and competitive as they endeavor to follow on their footsteps of their seniors. This Kiosk project became a benchmark and standard for many schools in the country that helped shape the curriculum for our technical education system with regards to all final year projects even with different disciplines. Skills Suhardi evidently exhibits the 5 different discovery skills of associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. His powerful technique of applying particularly the observation skills has enabled him to create high impact for himself and others. Suhardi’s high inquisitive and observation skills have aided him to get positive results in many of his work. “Since I was young, I was motivated to learn new technologies, especially wanting to know how to improve on it”, said Suhardi. His associating skills helped bring together many students to perform more effectively as a team and have proven beneficial to everybody. Suhardi manages to integrate and connect the IT subjects he taught into application through a process that enabled students to exceed their own expectation. He uses rigorous instruction in teaching enabling students to work independently and stretch beyond their current abilities. During his interview, Suhardi mentioned about allowing the students to make mistakes and quickly learn from it as viewed positively by everybody. He created a positive environment where disagreement within teams is communal especially when dealing with people as they work on a particular task. Suhardi made learning from mistakes a form of culture or process and not just between him and the students but also among all students and their peers. Suhardi has displayed great passion about his subject interest and this resulted in influencing students into finding new ways of thinking and solving real-world problems at multiple perspectives. Suhardi states that the most successful way of engaging the students is done by igniting their own individual interest. “I always try to make learning fun”, said Suhardi. He also treated the students with great patience and perseverance until they become successful. The idea is to reach their ultimate goal of turning a conceptual idea of a project into a working prototype. |
Bio
Suhardi is a teaching lecturer at Saiful Rijal technical college in Brunei Darussalam. He received his Bachelors of Arts Degree in Multimedia awarded with distinctions from RMIT University, Australia. Suhardi has a strong passion for education where he teaches students in Information Communication Technology). Through his unrelenting commitment and perseverance, he propels students to win many ICT Awards both at national and international level for the country. Suhardi is a tech wizard and an innovative lecturer. |