Working with TIF (The Island Foundation) through the course of our service trip to Bintan and developing a lesson plan for their usage has helped understand the socioeconomic status of Bintan and what communities over there are like, and has been unlike anything else I’ve done before. However, the lesson plan in particular has made me gain insight into how the minds of children work and expand more specifically upon ideas that I had a vague understanding of before.

I always knew that our attention spans grow as we grow older, but I never quite thought about how small the attention spans of children truly are. Initially, we hadn’t really considered our audience when designing our lesson plan, and we’d gone about it with ourselves in mind. However, we soon realized that younger children are worlds apart in terms of attention span and how they learn. We learnt that their attention spans are around 10-15 minutes, and that they tend to prefer interactive activities and visual representations as opposed to sitting down and being talked to. This ties in with what we’d been doing in Humanities class, regarding Piaget and Vygotsky. Piaget disagreed that intelligence is fixed and innate, and that it is developed upon through a person’s life. Our lesson as a whole is heavily dependant on the previous activity done, since each new activity builds on the last one, tying in with Piaget. Vygotsky also stated that social interaction is key to learn effectively, and that’s what we’ve done in our lesson, allowing for plenty of chances to collaborate with others, which improves their learning regarding the subject and develops 21st century skills along the way.

A big part of the reason Indonesia finds itself in the developmental situation it’s in now is a result of its current education system. It is very teacher-centered, doesn’t encourage critical thinking, doesn’t encourage students to collaborate and learn together, and isn’t really effective as a whole. If a more cohesive approach that follows in the footsteps of Piaget and Vygotsky is considered, students will be able to build 21st century skills, be able to learn far more than they can now, and this in turn will lead to more students pursuing a higher education of a greater quality, which will allow for opportunities to be available, and will lead to Indonesia’s developmental status improving rapidly.