Student Learning Space

Why it existed

SLS is Singapore's national online learning platform for schools: a common place for curriculum-aligned resources, teacher-created lessons, self-directed learning, and collaboration. During COVID-19, that platform became critical infrastructure. When Singapore shifted to Home-Based Learning during the circuit breaker, learning had to continue across homes with different devices, bandwidth, routines, and levels of adult support.

The friction it answered

The platform had to support a sharper range of real-world conditions than before. Not every household had a laptop available at the same time. Students could be learning from shared computers, tablets, or phones. Teachers needed authoring tools that could support different lesson designs, while students needed the experience to be clearer under stress.

What was built

Shaped product features, contributed to design critiques, led backlog refinement, and wrote behaviour-driven specifications in Gherkin so scope was clear and testable before development. The work sat across UI modernisation, platform behaviour, backend architecture, and QA clarity at a time when requirements were moving quickly.

What it left behind

The main lesson was the difference between building sites, workflow products, and content products. SLS is closer to a Photoshop-style creation tool than a product with one prescribed user flow. Teachers are not moving through a fixed funnel. They are assembling lessons, activities, media, assignments, and feedback loops in many valid ways. That changed the product work: it was less about designing the "correct" path, and more about making a flexible authoring tool clear, testable, and hard to misuse.