Songpa-gu 'Songpa Saem Future Education Center Master Plan' Established

SongpaSsaem Core Infrastructure Future Education Centers to Operate 15 Locations by Late 2024... Master Plan Established to Effectively Distribute Increasing Future Education Demand with Function and Role Segmentation by Center, Building a Systematic Operation Structure of Head-Hub-Regional-Specialized Levels

[Asia Economy Reporter Jong-il Park] Songpa-gu (Mayor Park Seong-su) is establishing and promoting the '2021 Songpa SSEM Future Education Center Master Plan' to ensure that residents across the region can tangibly experience the results of its own education support system, Songpa SSEM (SSEM).

The district plans to operate a total of 15 Future Education Centers, the core infrastructure of Songpa SSEM, by the second half of this year.

Accordingly, by establishing the master plan, they have effectively distributed the gradually increasing demand for future education, segmented the functions and roles of each center step-by-step, and built a systematic operational framework of Head-Hub-Local-Specialization.

HEAD centers serve as control towers that integrate management of 15 centers, including future education program research and dissemination, instructor training, and educational equipment, providing the correct direction for future education.

HUB centers act as regional hubs within their districts and provide large-scale field trip and experience programs in makerspace areas that can accommodate more than 100 people simultaneously.

They mainly satisfy future education demands arising from educational institutions such as schools. Ogeum Hub Center and Samjeon Hub Center perform these functions.

LOCAL centers are responsible for future education within local living areas easily accessible to youth, where education is conducted in small group formats.

In particular, a SPECIALIZATION center has been added, which integrates future education into the educational functions of existing facilities (Resource Circulation Park, Bangi-dong Ecological Learning Center, Songpa Safety Experience Education Center) to provide specialized field trip experience programs.

Additionally, the Future Education Centers have strengthened the substance of Songpa SSEM by developing independent educational curricula and training instructors themselves to provide differentiated and precise guidance for youth’s future education.

Since last year, they have been developing educational content in collaboration with the official LEGO Education Learning Centers ‘Global Eduworks’ and ‘EMCS’ (Educator's Meeting of Coaching STEAM), successfully completing the production of coding textbooks (Songpa SSEM AI School) in March.

This is the first case nationwide among local governments to independently develop a coding education curriculum and open courses. Going forward, they plan to continuously develop and distribute educational curricula expanding into fields such as 3D printing, VR, and robotics.

Furthermore, to train their own instructors, they have actively discovered outstanding local talents and conducted systematic coding specialist education, carefully selecting instructors through separate tests. Currently, five coding instructors from the first training cohort are active, with continuous recruitment planned to build a robust talent pool.

Mayor Park Seong-su stated, “We will quantitatively expand future education centers evenly across regions for the convenience of youth, and qualitatively promote the training of local talent instructors and the solidification of curricula. We aim to create a top-tier education city where anyone with the will to learn can receive the education they desire.”