MDEC's #MyDigitalMaker Fair Returns To Inspire Young Digital Makers

CYBERJAYA: The Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), Malaysia’s lead digital economy agency, today announced the return of the #MyDigitalMaker Fair 2021.

Held for the second year through a virtual platform, the annual fair is slated to take place from 11 October to 21 November 2021.

The fair is expected to take place in a five-part series, with each focusing on specific localities - Perak, East Coast, Kedah, Sabah as well as the Central and Southern regions.

Each series has been designed to give visitors a hands-on digital experience through a variety of exciting programmes - career path awareness, digital-making workshops for teachers and students, self-learning content, competitions, webinars, and exhibitions.

The digital fair serves as the flagship event for MDEC’s #mydigitalmaker Movement. It was created to provide experiential opportunities as well as inspire future generations to embark on career pathways towards digital technology, in line with the Malaysia Digital Economy Blueprint (MyDIGITAL).

“We must future-proof our children with essential skills that will help them thrive in the fast-evolving digital economy. Initiatives such as MDEC’s #mydigitalmaker Movement aims to play a crucial role to prosperously transform Keluarga Malaysia into being digitally-savvy, to achieve the goals of MyDIGITAL and the 12th Malaysia Plan,” said YB Tan Sri Datuk Seri Panglima TPr Haji Annuar bin Musa, Minister of Communications and Multimedia.

A joint public-private-academia initiative, the #mydigitalmaker Movement was launched in August 2016 to create a nation of digital makers by transforming Malaysian youth from digital users to digital producers, a mission established to address the need of future-proofing the next generation.

It involves strategic programmes that help to strengthen digital skills among youth such as coding, application development, 3D printing, robotics, embedded systems and data analytics.

“The #mydigitalmaker Movement is a crucial programme in inculcating a love for all-things digital and equipping our next generation of digital producers and leaders with not only the necessary skills and knowledge, but a digital-first mindset. The 12th Malaysia Plan has made digital central to the growth of the economy and MDEC will continue to drive the digital economy forward, in line with Malaysia’s vision,” said Mahadhir Aziz, CEO, MDEC.

To date, more than 2.2 million children have benefited from the initiative through the integration of computational thinking and coding into the national school curriculum, co-curricular activities conducted in schools as well as extra-curricular activities conducted in more than 60 Digital Maker Hubs and by the #mydigitalmaker ecosystem partners.

To provide more localised content at the grassroots level, this year’s virtual fair is being jointly hosted by five strategic partners - Perak’s State Education Department, Jazari Robot Resources, Kedah State Government via Kedah Digital Center, iTrain Kids Sdn Bhd and Petrosains Sdn Bhd.

The virtual fair will commence with the Perak session, which is also being extended to Penang, happening from 11 to 15 October 2021. Participants can look forward to workshops and sharing sessions by Digital Perak Corporation Holdings, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, National STEM Association (Perak) and Asia Drone IoT Technologies.

Each fair will last for a week to give local communities ample time to access the more than 100 workshops, webinars and tutorials organised for the students and teachers. Exciting prizes and giveaways await the participants.

From 17 October to 22 October, the fair hosted by Jazari Robot Resources will focus on the East Coast and will feature sessions by Universiti Malaysia Kelantan, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, Universiti Malaysia Pahang, Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin, University College TATI, National STEM Association (Terengganu), Pusat Sains dan Kreativiti Terengganu and CyberSecurity Malaysia among others.

Overall, the #MyDigitalMaker Fair 2021 will also feature exclusive content from a wide range of tech and communication players such as TikTok Malaysia, IBM Malaysia, PlayStation Studios Malaysia, Digi Telecommunications and Maxis, as well as local and international non-profit organisations such as UNICEF Malaysia and Code.org.

“I want to thank MDEC for inviting me to participate in this year’s #mydigitalmaker Fair. It’s been an honour for Code.org to work closely with the MDEC team for the past several years as an official Code.org International Partner,” said Hadi Partovi, CEO of Code.org.

In conjunction with the fair, TikTok Malaysia is supporting the effort to ignite interest towards digital technologies to school students and teachers by launching the #BelajarDigital awareness campaign.

Since its inception in 2017, the flagship event of the #mydigitalmaker Movement has brought awareness about digital innovation and creativity to more than 82,000 participants.

For more information on the #mydigitalmaker Movement, please visit https://mdec.my/mydigitalmaker/ or follow us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/mydigitalmakermovement for latest updates.