Kenneth Y T Lim operates at the intersection of cultural anthropology, the learning sciences, and cognitive psychology. Kenneth is one of about a dozen people worldwide to have been invited by UNESCO as a member of the organization's Symposia on the Future of Education for Sustainable Development, 2016 - 2017. Kenneth has extensive experience in curriculum design, teaching and training in various contexts, and designing research interventions around the investigation of new media literacies.
He conceptualised the Six Learnings framework of curriculum design for fictive worlds and virtual environments. The framework has been scaled and translated to a variety of learning contexts, spanning from Upper Primary to Undergraduate levels; through the latter he has been awarded an 'Education in Excellence' (EdeX) grant for 2015 / 2016 by the Nanyang Technological University.
In recognition of the quality of his research and the scalability of his practice, his work was chosen as one of only three Research With Impact case studies for the National Institute of Education's Office of Education Research / Office of Strategic Planning and Academic Quality 'Research Excellence Report' in 2017. Kenneth was also conferred a United Kingdom – Southeast Asia Collaborative Development Award by the British High Commission and British Council in 2014.
Research Positions
Most recently, his team has designed a field-based inquiry curriculum using open-source hardware and software, which they call Maker Motes. In 2016 he and his team enbarked on translating the Maker Motes approach to urban and peri-urban schools in the ASEAN region. Kenneth edited a book titled ‘Landscapes of participatory making, modding and hacking: maker culture and makerspaces’ which was published in 2017.
In recognition of his expertise in the mediation between maker culture and learning, Kenneth was invited by UNESCO as a Plenary Speaker at the 2016 conference of the Asia-Pacific Programme for Educational Innovation and Development. He was also a Visiting Scholar at the Education University of Hong Kong.
Kenneth's work on the Six Learnings framework and Maker Motes helped him posit a theory of learning around the notion of Disciplinary Intuitions; the latter is elaborated on in a book published in 2015 by Springer.
Editorships / Convenorships
Lim, K. Y. T., J. Comings, R. Lee, M. D. Yuen, A. Hilmy, D. Chua and B. H. Song, “A guidebook on developing digital games for early grade literacy for developing countries” Foundation for Information Technology Education and Development, Inc: (2017). Commissioned by the All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development Partners—the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), World Vision, and the Australian Government; the UK Government’s Department for International Development; and the International Development Research Centre, Canada.
Lim, K. Y. T. (ed.), “Landscapes of participatory making, modding and hacking: Maker culture and makerspaces” Cambridge Scholars: (2017).
Lim, K. Y. T. (ed.), “Disciplinary Intuitions and the design of learning environments” Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer: (2015); indexed by SCOPUS.
Lim, K. Y. T. (session convenor), “Geographies of making: the jazz of participatory fabrication, improvisation and hackerspaces” Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society, sponsored by the Economic Geography Research Group, London, England, 26 – 29 August 2014.
Hung, D., K. Y. T. Lim and S.-S. Lee (eds.), “Adaptivity as a transformative disposition for learning in the 21st century” Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer (2014).
Lim, K. Y. T., Y. H. Cho and M. Vallance (eds.), Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, special issue on “Asian perspectives”, 5(2): 2012.
Jarmon, L., K. Y. T. Lim and B. Stephen Carpenter II (eds.), Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, special issue on “Pedagogy, education and innovation in virtual worlds”, 2(1): 2009.