One Saturday in the early 2000s, a virus crippled the IT infrastructure of Mr Tao Chong Meng’s workplace. When his software suppliers couldn’t help, Mr Tao rolled up his sleeves and searched for solutions online.

He found a free, open-source operating system that was maintained by a global community of volunteers. After rebuilding parts of his company’s IT infrastructure using the OS and community assistance, he started to view free and open-source IT tools differently. He saw their potential to empower IT practitioners in ways that could level the playing field for the less privileged.

“I realised this was something that’s going to last for people and companies without deep pockets. We don’t have to just rely on one type of paid operating system,” says Mr Tao.

Today, as Lead Lecturer at ITE College East’s School of Electronics and Info-comm Technology, Mr Tao advocates the use of open-source and other free tools such as Python and Pandas.

He has seen how the ready accessibility to free tools helps to give disadvantaged students a competitive edge. He is also heartened that most technology and data companies, his students’ potential employers, now operate using open-source solutions and databases. 

"The demand for high computational power and increasing cost of commercial AI-related resources poses a barrier for financially disadvantaged students,” says Mr Tao.

"Open-source technology levels the playing field, providing access to powerful resources regardless of financial constraints. This aligns with my commitment to equity and social mobility."

Partnering his students towards confidence

Mr Tao has been teaching in areas such as programming, the Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics, and AI applications.

His takeaway? “Man masters technology to have it serve man.” 

Mr Tao influences his students to research, test, and apply their tech knowledge to simplify everyday tasks and systems workflows. Some solutions come with telltale names like the Swimming Pool IoT Intrusion Alert system and the College East Smart Campus Dashboard. 

Other solutions are more cutting-edge and sound the part, like “maintaining and updating Raspberry Pi operating systems using tools such as BalenaEtcher, dd, and PiShrink”. 

While being tech-savvy and tech-focused (students affectionately call him “The Smart One”), Mr Tao is also highly approachable – students say they feel motivated to strive harder from talking to him about all kinds of concerns, even non-academic ones. 

A diligent but shy student agreed to take on the role of Class Chairman, with Mr Tao’s moral support. The student went on to lead the College’s Guitar Club. And as a working adult now, he returns to ITE to teach guitar and also volunteers as a grassroots leader. 

Another student with Special Educational Needs was supported by Mr Tao’s tailored interventions. Drawing on his own experience of supporting his son’s unique learning needs, as well as seeing how instrumental his son’s teachers were to his academic progress, Mr Tao adapted his lesson and communication styles to encourage the student to learn better and verbalise more spontaneously. They celebrated his graduation from ITE two years ago.

There are times Mr Tao would literally partner a student to success.

One of them just needed a teacher to believe in his programming potential. He teamed up with Mr Tao for the Siemens Industrial Edge Competition in 2023. They used leading data visualisation and database platforms to develop an indoor farming dashboard that monitored sensors and sent live alerts – a real boon for vertical farms. They emerged as winners in the ITE category, with his student “doing 75 per cent of the work”, says Mr Tao proudly.

That student went on to pursue a diploma in aerospace electronics at Temasek Polytechnic, and also clinch the second runner-up place at the NASA Space Apps Challenge Singapore in 2024.

Replicating the real world by 'breaking things'

To prepare his students for the future, Mr Tao tries to create a classroom culture that mirrors the fast-paced tech industry.

Instead of providing them with user-friendly, plug-and-play paid tools with limited customisation abilities, he deliberately sets up “productive struggles”, where students need to take apart a system, troubleshoot, read manuals, research community forums, and design technical solutions.

Mr Tao also “dual-boots” classroom computers with both Linux and Microsoft operating systems to encourage students familiar with either one or the other to take a stab at using something unknown to them.

“The students dig deeper to explore and they’re not afraid of ‘breaking things’. If something crashes, you can always use AI to troubleshoot for you,” he explains. This process of experimentation and iteration is how students can build competence to deal with real-world tech projects – often involving constant failure, debugging and pivoting.

Building AI literacy in students and colleagues

The belief that powerful tools should reach as many as possible extends beyond Mr Tao’s classroom. 

When ITE’s then-CEO identified an urgent need to build AI literacy across the three colleges, Mr Tao was selected to lead a team to develop a prompt engineering module from scratch. The result was the AI2900 Prompt Engineering Baseline (PEBL) module, designed to be accessible to staff and students of all backgrounds, with short clear text and quizzes at each stage. 

And in true Mr Tao fashion, he added optional resources to lead learners towards open-source local AI models served by tools such as Ollama. 

Since its launch in July 2024, PEBL has reached over 10,000 students and 1,000 staff across all ITE colleges. It has since been made a compulsory module for all Pre-Employment Training students.

And during a GovTech incubator programme in 2024 to create an AI-assisted marking system, Mr Tao and his team eschewed paid AI models for open-source models. “This prevents confidential student data from being sent to external servers,” he explains.

The system can process 2,000 quiz responses in under eight minutes. Now deployed within Mr Tao’s department for course assessments, it frees tutors up to set more practice questions and give timely feedback to students. 

Giving of this nature is what drives the educator in Mr Tao. "My core value is simple: education should empower and be accessible to all," he puts it stoically, adding, “If we keep everything to ourselves, nobody grows with you.”

“My core value is simple: Education should empower and be accessible to all.” 
Mr Tao