• Aphasia refers to an acquired disorder of language functions that affects the ability to understand, speak, read, and write across various performance levels from word, sentence, to discourse. People with aphasia (PWA) are affected not only in communication, but also social functioning and quality of life. In qualitative phenomenological research, lived experience is a representation of the experiences and choices of a given person in the daily life, and the resultant knowledge that one gains. Each year in Hong Kong, there are over 20,000 new cases of stroke, of which up to 38% are affected by aphasia.
• Due to inherent communication difficulties, neurological and cognitive problems, as well as physical hurdles, PWA face extra barriers amid the pandemic that cause disparities in health services. In the past two years, many PWA have avoided going out amid the pandemic; this caused different degrees of regression of communication skills and social performance, as well as reduction of social well-being among PWA. How exactly PWA have been struggling amid the pandemic and limited in their capacity to keep abreast of the evolution of COVID remains under-examined, not just locally in Hong Kong but globally. In other words, the needs of PWA (and their family members or loved ones) during and after the pandemic is not fully understood; this seriously limits their social engagement and re-integration to community activities.
• The first part of this project (Year 1: 2022-23) will document, investigate, and report the challenges in communication and social engagement PWA faced under COVID-19. In particular, students can design and conduct structured interviews with PWA to share their views on this topic. They will also work with different related stakeholders of aphasia (e.g., caregivers or healthcare professionals such as social workers, nurses, doctors, paramedical therapists) to reflect on support/training offered to PWA in different clinical settings, such as hospitals, nursing homes, out-patient or university clinics, or community support groups.
• Part 2 of this project (Year 2-3: 2023-25) will focus on plans and strategies to engage PWA to social activities through both virtual and face-to-face platforms. In particular, apart from collaborating with recreation staff and/or allied health professionals in community centers and/or local support groups in Hong Kong to design, structure, and modify activities for PWA members, students will tailor-make and conduct cognitively-stimulating exercises, group activities, and/or communication tasks in different community settings to engage PWA. If applicable, students will also design and implement exercises or workshops for PWA members to use small, handheld, and adaptable aids to support their communication and basic activities of daily living.
• Through participating in this experiential learning project, students will not only gain hands-on practical experience in interacting with PWA and caregivers (and therefore gain a better understanding of the clinical communication symptoms of aphasia and family burdens described in classrooms/textbooks), but also improve their communication skills with different healthcare professionals who provide intervention to stroke patients. Students will also benefit from working with different healthcare professionals to tailor-make social and communication activities (to be conducted either virtually or in-person) that suit the specific needs of clients. The ultimate goal of this project is to allow more student speech therapists at HKU to learn aphasia from a different and more holistic perspective and to reveal dimensions of aphasia management outside the typical clinical context.
• Our interviews and reports will be publicized through social media and videos to raise public awareness of speech therapy and aphasia. These project-end deliverables aim to allow students to synthesize the classroom learning of aphasia with the practical aspects of hands-on interactions with PWA and other stakeholders of management of this disorder within the unique context of COVID-19.

According to the fifth report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if people are to prevent climate change from causing global climate disasters, rapid, far-reaching actions that would effect unprecedented changes at all levels of the society are essential. Among these levels, education is one of the most important channels to make sustainable changes. Thus, a proper understanding of nature and the environment is an important foundation for establishing appropriate environmental behaviour, hence effecting changes. In order to cultivate this behaviour among the future generations, it is essential for teachers to not just understand the importance of environmental education, but also to learn about its myriad methods of application to enhance teaching effectiveness.

Collaborating with Outdoor Wildlife Learning Hong Kong (OWLHK), this course aims to nurture ecologically knowledgeable and reflective student educators who can unravel the beauty of nature and make an educational impact to the future generations. Our student educators will first learn about the theoretical knowledge of Environmental Education and the reflective learning cycles in experiential education in both the nature and classrooms. Then they will work in cross-disciplinary teams to put their knowledge into practice – designing and facilitating secondary school students’ learning process in an outdoor environmental education learning programme.

Students will be assigned to work in groups to (a) experience outdoor environmental educational programme themselves, (b) design and conduct an outdoor environmental educational programme, including pre-departure training, during-outing activities, and de-briefing sessions for a group of local Secondary 3 students. The final programme materials may be used by the OWLHK staff for future educational programmes for other schools.

Tai O is a remote village with over 30% elderly and over 40% household living below the poverty line. Remote location and poverty are the main barriers for elderly in Tai O to access dental care. During the project, HKU dental students will provide dental examinations, preventive and simple restorative treatments to the participating elderly. In a train-the-trainer approach, teenagers in Tai O will be empowered by HKU students to take leading roles to promote self and community oral health, participate and assist in the delivery of oral care. Through oral-care delivery and home visits, HKU students can understand the social issues citizens in Tai O are facing.

Undocumented children and orphans are vulnerable to exploitation and denial from basic child welfare. In Africa, over 50% of children and refugees have no legal identities and are of unknown age. Dental age assessment is a validated method to determine one’s age and enable unregistered individuals to obtain their legal identities and secure their human rights. Citizens in Togo also have limited access to dental care, as there were only 15 registered dentists in Togo in 2008. The project provides dental students with the opportunities to serve children and orphans through providing oral health campaigns, and to promote birth registration among vulnerable groups in the third-world countries.

Students from the Faculty of Medicine should know about the meaning of life-and-death. 30 senior Medical and Nursing students will have four workshops on “life-and-death”:
1. What is death?
2. Meaning of life: fulfillment, and cherishing of quality life experiences
3. Death and Grief
4. How to Prepare?
After the workshop, students will have a field-trip to Taiwan to visit the palliative care facilities, healing gardens, and farewell services, etc. Taiwan is one of the leaders in promoting life-and-death education. In the trip, students will discuss with the leaders of different parties to understand more about this topic.

The project will provide 17 students from Faculty of Social Sciences and Comparative Literature students opportunities to conduct onsite case study on social business in Kenya, Singapore or mainland China. Under the supervision and guidance of the NGO supervisors, the students who choose to go to Kenya will be able to interview the small business clients and document the impact of the business loan in growing the local business with a social purpose. In Singapore or mainland China, the students will focus on the social business innovator development. All the students will gather in Hong Kong to share their case study of your areas in the final reflective meeting.

This proposal seeks to provide 24 months (2 rounds) of ‘umbrella’ funding to students, teachers, and learning partners involved in innovative experiential learning initiatives linked to the Common Core. The grant will allow for continuous application for experiential learning projects/activities and undergraduate students (as individuals or in groups) to pursue transdisciplinary experiential projects/activities, with an estimated project impact on the learning of at least 4,000 undergraduate students. A mechanism will help streamline and widen the adoption and participation of experiential learning across the curriculum and cross-programmatically via our existing connections established across all 10 Faculties. The proposed initiative will expand the scope of the Common Core’s future readiness programmes, enable (co)curricular local, regional and international impact, strengthening the impact of Common Core initiatives on student learning at HKU.

This pilot project takes twelve (12) HKU undergraduate students from across different faculties on a research study trip to Mae Sot in Thailand (on the Thai-Myanmar border) during the reading week of the Spring Semester 2023. The study explores the experiences of Myanmar refugee youths struggling to find educational opportunities in two learning centres, as well as their educational pathways and future aspirations. HKU students will conduct a literature review of the educational context in the region, interviews with experts, NGOs, and the affected Myanmar youth, and co-produce podcasting episodes with the Myanmar refugee students. The objective is to use the podcasts to make a positive impact in furthering quality education by highlighting digital platforms of communication, best practices for improving teaching and learning, areas for improvement, and challenges persisting in the educational and broader context.

Rainforests are biologically rich terrestrial ecosystems, but under increasing human pressures such as logging, burning and conversion to agriculture. We will travel to Danum Valley Conservation Area, tropical rainforest in Sabah Malaysia. Students will carry out research projects, collecting data on the ecology and human threats to tropical rainforests. In addition to course lectures, students will receive guest lectures from local researchers and gain an understanding of the threats to biodiversity in tropical rainforests landscapes.

Beyond the Pivot (志行會, BTP) is a non-profit charitable organization established by Mainland students of the University of Hong Kong in 2009, which is officially registered with the Mainland Civil Affairs Department (Unified Credit Code: 52440113M JL049389L) and the Hong Kong SAR Government (Charity Tax File No.91/10725). With the aim of spreading the spirit of benevolence, we are devoted to improving the living conditions in developing areas while promoting local education and healthcare. Founded in 2010 as a branch of BTP, SinCere Project has conducted 9 successful teaching activities, helped over 1,000 children from more than 5 villages since then, and sent more than 200 volunteers to the rural areas in Sichuan to support local education. Our team features the “1+1 teaching mode” and innovative curriculums, both of which aim at providing children with lasting help through long-term contact. Over the past 8 years, we have been able to carry out various activities concerning the children’s overall development and the publicity of health knowledge in local primary and middle schools.

In response to the local primary schools’ lack of English teaching resources and physiological health education, we have provided additional English teaching material and health information dissemination. In order to better fulfill local students’ education desires, we have developed academic seminars, science experiments, developmental training, and inspiring speech contests, which have helped them develop their interests and expanded their horizons. In addition, we are committed to making up the limitations of short-term teaching and hope to establish long-term and stable relationships with local students, we have held a book donation and gift-giving activity and a tree hole mailbox have been sent to local schools where children could feel free to write about their concerns to volunteers.

According to interviews with local students, they reported they are more capable of dealing with sudden changes in their body and mental development and have greatly improved their academic performances. The activities have encouraged children to break out of their comfort zone and courageously pursue and realize themselves so that they can see more possibilities for their future and maybe start to think about their life planning. Not only could local students get improved, but volunteers also learned deeper about the spirit of social service and were motivated to make more contributions to society or even pursued social work as their occupation. While teaching younger students, volunteers could demonstrate their learned knowledge and improve their ability to deliver presentations at HKU. Deliverables including posts from our official account, students’ reflections, volunteers’ teaching diaries, and evaluation videos are available if needed.

This interdisciplinary project aims to enhance public understanding of the past in the Ancient Near East by deploying the latest digital humanities technologies. Our target audience is all visitors to the Vedi River Valley in Armenia, and to its main site, the Vedi Fortress. This audience includes children’s school groups, members of the local community, and national and international tourists. The main technology that will be used by visitors is Augmented Reality (AR), which will allow viewing of both the real physical sites as well as virtual reconstructions of ancient structures, at the same time. This should enhance visitor understanding of ancient life, society, and the use of the local landscape thousands of years ago. In other words, we plan to make the simple remains of sites and architecture come alive again visually, by using spatially-aware AR, so that reconstructions appear above actual ruins. We can also add virtual tour guides, with both 3d animations and audio, or provide other annotations that give extra information in multiple media to users at each point of interest in the landscape. With its spatial positioning, the AR device could guide visitors with maps and arrows for an efficient and meaningful tour experience. We plan to begin with smartphone apps, but eventually we would like to implement hands-free head-mounted devices or AR glasses to give such tours.

For our first steps, during the summer of 2023, we will join an active archaeological field project in Armenia to learn more about the local archaeological sites and landscapes and to do initial testing with the technology. We will join the Ararat Plain Southeast Archaeological Project (APSAP), under the direction of Dr Cobb. There, we will learn all about how an archaeological project functions on a day-to-day basis by taking part in excavation and data collection. It is important that we teach the public not just what archaeologists conclude about the past, but also how they learn this information.

In addition to learning about archaeology, the students will also make contacts with local stakeholders, such as the local heritage preservation organization, and the local town and regional governments. They may also reach out to service providers such as hotels, restaurants, and tour guides, in order to better understand local tourism potential. Finally, they will work with an APSAP team on an educational program that is teaching Armenian schoolchildren about archaeology, including about digital methods of data collection and teaching.

The students on this project, who come from the Engineering, Arts, Education, and Architecture Faculties, will help to build and test a prototype smartphone application. They will also help develop 3D models of archaeological data and virtual reconstructions. Our goal is to also begin testing of the app with actual visitors – the schoolchildren, local community members, and tourists. We will develop a framework for measuring effective impact on the public’s understanding of the ancient past through the AR experiences. We also hope that our work will have a positive economic impact for our partners in the local community.

In this project, in collaboration with the Yellow Boat of Hope Foundation and Clearbot, we intend to create an artificial intelligence model attached to a camera which can track, analyse, and separate trash on the Clearbot robot. The aim of this is to improve the efficacy of the Clearbot and to help local communities track and analyse the trash entering marine bodies, hence allowing NGOs and local governments to make informed policy decisions. Clearbot is a robot that can be deployed autonomously into a water body and collect trash, helping reduce water pollution. It is able to clean up trash, oil, and foam, but any item cleaned up is simply disposed collectively instead of sorting it for better processing. The aim of the project is to create a powerful AI detection software and integrate it with the existing hardware components of the Clearbot. The AI software would be able to 1) Detect the trash moving into the bot 2) Differentiate between trash and other objects or marine life (fish, buoys etc) 3) Identify the type of trash and collect metrics on it.
The utility of this, while primarily for the use of research, can manifest itself in many ways. Children in the Philippines that use boats to travel to school will benefit greatly from the cleaning of the water. Pollutants can cause a myriad of diseases such as cholera and typhoid and reducing them greatly benefits their health. The data used can not only be monitored to understand more about the nature of pollutants in specific water bodies, but also the trends across water bodies. It will also prevent any damage to marine life, as well as improve the efficacy of cleaning the water. We will then deploy Clearbot and collect data through a series of tests, and conduct Big Data analysis in order to inform the Yellow Boat of Hope Foundation and local stakeholders of our results. We hope that in the process of cleaning the water, we are also able to understand the source of these pollutants and help local stakeholders make improved policy decisions. There are many challenges that are to be faced in the future. Obtaining parts for some of the features of the camera components, and in addition to that, building low-cost alternatives to high cost parts will be the primary engineering challenge faced. The greater challenge would be in testing and improving the AI model on-site with real time feedback. The AI engineers will need to ensure that the model is able to withstand real life conditions and perform satisfactorily.

The Yonder Narnia Project (YNP) is a voluntary teaching project that concentrates on rural education of Yunnan Province. The project was founded by Beyond the Pivot (BTP) in 2010 and has a close cooperation with Teaching Corps in North-west Yunnan, a non-government organization. Ever since the foundation, YNP have conducted 17 on-the-spot teaching activities with15 of them held in primary school in Ninglang, Lijiang, China.

We provide broadening courses on arts and natural science and various extension activities, such as Career experiencing, Disease Protection and Health, to the elementary and middle school students in Yunnan Province. By offering extracurricular classes to local children, they are able to extend their borders of knowledge and achieve a deeper understanding of the world. With the help of our volunteers, students are also able to form more effective learning and living habits.

To equip student volunteers with abundant knowledge of teaching, we will conduct workshops during the second semester. In the workshops, experienced voluntary teachers will be invited to give speeches about teaching methods. Volunteers will spend 2-3 hours a week on preparing curriculums for local schools, in which they will learn how to cooperate with others and how to give an interesting lecture. Although summer project only lasts for two weeks due to exam time of local schools, this program will surely provide opportunities for HKU students to join in voluntary work and know about rural areas in Southern China.

In the end, every year after the project, we collect volunteers’ teaching diaries, photos, learning worlds of local students as the deliverables of our project. We will present the most typical works on the social media to arouse more attention on the education in rural areas of China. Through the efforts made by YNP in last few years, more and more students in HKU are interested in voluntary works and HKU has earned a good reputation in Teaching Corps in North-west Yunnan and domestic schools in Yunnan Province.