Underprivileged, and disabled communities have a harder time expressing themselves to the public also due to lack of platform and awareness. Therefore, this project aims to promote and empower this community to embrace their true selves and expose their feelings to the public.  For this project we will do writing workshops for these communities and then collect the products from these workshops to be compiled into a book filled with their thoughts and emotions on how they live their lives. It will be authentic so that people can see from their point of view. With this, we can raise awareness on the way these communities live. The content of the book will explicitly be writing from 50 people from the community. A person has one page spread that they can fill with a poem, essay, short story or even doodles as a way to express themselves including description from our editing team explaining the writer’s thoughts and their environment through interview with the writers.The objective: To raise awareness of how this community lives, how we interact with them and their perspective on life.The workshop, led by my team, is to help the community find comfort in writing no matter their experience in writing.To give them a platform to express themselves. 

The understanding of ‘Rukun Negara’ among the young generation should be reinforced. Not just in terms of memorizing, the children should be able to explain the meaning of each of the principles. It is more effective to apply the introduction of ‘Rukun Negara’ at an early stage as they can grow up applying it. 

Language proficiency among rural school students is usually found to be below average, compared to students from urban and city schools. Student self confidence level to speak is relatively low. During the Movement Control Order (MCO) period, the situation becomes worse as students spend most of their time at home, without regular contact and supervision of their teachers. Activities related to enhancement of communication skills such as public speaking competition, motivational camp etc. are limited. From our observation, participation in speaking related competitions such as storytelling and debate are dominated by students from city schools. The other issue related to poor language proficiency is lack of reading culture among the rural school students. Our plan is to conduct a program, namely the Read to Speak Out Campaign (RSOC)at one of the rural schools in Perlis, SK Jelempok. The initiative is to benefit around 30 Standard 4 to Standard 6 students. The program involves setting up a speaking and reading corner at the school, mentoring sessions with UniMAP students and a public speaking competition.  From our brief conversation with the headmaster of SK Jelempok, some students need help in improving self confidence to speak in front of a big crowd. The school is supportive as this initiative is in line with their aim to improve leadership and communication skills among students. The students can be prepared to represent the school in any related competitions at state or national level. It is hoped that this inaugural program will be a great success in improving student language proficiency and confidence in delivering their thoughts on current issues. Similar ideas can be replicated in other rural schools.  

There is an issue currently in Perhentian Island, Terengganu, which is too much domestic waste. This program mainly planned to help minimise waste being transferred to the mainland as the state government doesn’t provide a landfill for them as a site for the waste disposal in the island as it will affect its beauty. Hence, they are transferring all the domestic waste from the island to the mainland. It stated that the three primary islands in Terengganu are Perhentian Island (the project site), Kapas Island, and Redang Island with an estimated 500 tons of waste as of 2016, transferred to the mainland. It doesn’t only cost them a lot of money to move all the trash to the mainland. Still, it also affects the local community as the domestic waste is only transferred occasionally. It causes an unpleasant smell, and it is also risky for the local community to help move the trash to the mainland. 

Language Café is a one-stop centre for the students to enjoy learning English language in an exciting way. The young students will be exposed to a conducive and positive environment in the room that provides various forms of teaching and learning materials. The games from the previous English language activity called Grammar Learning Adventures (GLAD) conducted by UiTM Negeri Sembilan, Kampus Rembau shall be added into the room to give students more comfortable spaces to gain their knowledge. This room will also be used in spreading the joy of learning English Language as well as the joy of learning Grammar Learning Adventures (GLAD) to the other under-enrolled schools in the rural area of Rembau.The Language Café will be set up at SK Bongek, Rembau. This school has been chosen as it is located in a rural area which is SK Bongek, (NBA3011), Km 31, Jalan Tampin, 71300 Rembau, Negeri Sembilan. The total number of students from Year 1 to Year 6 are less than 150 which to be categorized as one of the under-enrolled schools. This is the first school that has experienced the English language activity called Grammar Learning Adventures (GLAD) conducted by UiTM Negeri Sembilan, Kampus Rembau. In this Language Café project, approximately 20 primary students from this school will be trained by student facilitators and lecturers from UiTM Negeri Sembilan, Kampus Rembau to become “Buddy Trainers”on Grammar Learning Adventures (GLAD) for another under-enrolled school in Rembau,that is, SK Kampong Batu.SK Kampong Batu is the second under-enrolled school that has been chosen to experience Grammar Learning Adventures (GLAD). SK Kampong Batu has been categorized as one of the under-enrolled schools in Rembau which has less than 150 students. It is located just 3.1km from SK Bongek. SK Kampong Batu (NBA3009) is located at No. 1, Kampong Batu, Negeri Sembilan, 71300 Rembau, Negeri Sembilan.Due to the local environment that lacks the use of English, students in both schools need to be exposed to an environment that could increase their motivation not just to learn but also to love English. This will give them the confidence to communicate well in English with their teachers, peers and for their future use too.The students face problems when it comes to speaking in English as they have grammatical difficulties. Grammar is one of the important parts in English language. Unfortunately, the students have yet not mastered their grammar which has led to English communication difficulties not in just writing but in speaking too. This is based on the interview with the principal of the school and has caused a concern by both the principal and the school English Language teachers.If the students are given a chance to experience a new and comfortable environment which allows the students to have a high interest to love and use English, their communicative ability could also be improved. 

Au2 Taman Keramat is located in district of Ampang in Selangor, alongside the Klang River. The village consists of 18-block flats with 668 units while the overall population is approximately 2300 people. According to the leader of taman, crime rates are high within the community. Prior to EMCO1.0 (Year 2020), we had the opportunity to run a live-build project ( Keramat Community Library ). During the post-mortem, we had come to a realization that although we have a tangible final built library,but  there was less ideal collaborative condition during the implementation this community project. First, the lack of communication and engagement between university students and the youth community which led to an imbalanced community project because 90% of the builders were from the university hence it becomes an “one-sided” projectthat focused on the university students rather than the whole community.  Therefore, the reflection of our previous project should be taken into strong consideration to understand the proper method to construct a healthier way of engaging the community. Several researches will also be done in order to produce a general guideline for community engagement.From understanding the situation, we hope to contribute our knowledge in architecture (the understanding of relation of people and place) to ease some of the social, environmental and community work. To instil the importance of a community public space, we hope to have a participatory community engagement which includes the youth to be more proactive and involved. This workshop shall teach the community to be able to build, sustain, and innovate on future designs if they wish to.  

Sekolah Kebangsaan Parit Keroma Darat is one of the oldest schools in Muar Johor. It was developed after World War II with the name “Sekolah Melayu Parit Keroma Darat Muar. The performance of pupils of SK Parit Keroma Darat in Science and Mathematics in the last few year’s assessment has taken a dip. The issues related to STEM education. After a few discussions with Puan Mastura, one of the Science teachers, we found that the students are less interested in STEM because they think that STEM is a hard branch of study. One of the reasons for the declining number of students’ enrolment for STEM subjects is due to lack of interest which then brings them to be involved in non-STEM subjects. The students showed lack of interest as well as limited awareness about STEM subjects. Collaboration between university students and the teachers can help the STEM empowerment. We believe that by doing this project it helps us to expose and increase the interest of the students of Sekolah Kebangsaan Parit Keroma Darat. It is important to start STEM education at the early age of primary students because the children can build their interest towards science, technology, engineering, and mathematics at this age. When the children enter school, they can continue gaining the knowledge through investigation and exploration activities. By renovating and transforming a special activity center for STEM, the students can enhance their knowledge and engage themselves in the surrounding environment with fun and informative context. Creating a makerspace in a classroom is one way to accomplish this. Establish a space for hands-on learning that allows students to think, create, test and retest, and bring their inventions to life. 

Currently, there is a lack of mutual understanding among races in Malaysia due to the language barriers when teaching and understanding the tacit culture of many races. Therefore, to promote mutual understanding, this project will provide a platform for every race to share their virtues, cultures, and moral beliefs using the national language in a literare form. The poems will be collected via a call of poems targeted to university students and generally the public, which will be evaluated and passed by a panel of literary experts. Selected poems will be gathered and published in a book, which will be donated to libraries, schools, and/or other public-access reading areas. In the short-term, the project promotes the sharing of racial virtues and in the long-term, the project will publish a concrete cultural reference for the future Malaysian generation. 

My batchmate, Indran Arumugam is a hearing impaired person who expressed his feeling and story about how the deaf community is being left out especially during the pandemic within the society. Masks had become a hindrance for him to lip read because sign language is not normalised which makes it hard for him to even communicate. We would like to help break communication barriers as well as the deaf stereotypes and to hopefully normalise Malaysian sign language to undergraduates.We would like to help the deaf community by having multiple virtual webinars educating and training undergraduates the basic Malaysian sign language.Virtual webinars will be taught by my team members and I with the guidance and advice from a certified Malaysian sign language tutor, Mr. Mohd Armi from #SIGNON.