Smarter Me was founded in July 2016, by a former Investment Banker and Head of Strategy at a listed company.

We started off as a website where parents can search for all sorts of classes (a marketplace) - from swimming, to taekwondo, to art and music.

But we saw a gap in the the education that our kids are going through, and what they need for their future.
In this fast paced, tech-driven future, where a problem-solving mindset, creativity, collaboration, communication, and resilience are the core skills which humans need, we felt that our kids are ill-prepared.

Which is why we launched the new Smarter Me, a school that equips children and teens with the skillset, mindset and heartset to help them navigate through the future.

All our classes are designed to instill the 4C1R - Critical Thinking, Creativity, Communication, Collaboration, and Resilience, and most importantly - they are designed to be relevant to the real world, and as realistic as possible.

We specialise in 5 Masteries - Coding, Robotics, Entrepreneurship, Design Thinking and Financial Literacy, underpinned by Mindfulness and Happiness.

You can read more here.

Or watch these videos:

We (and our founder) have also been featured in a few articles:

Money FM

Straits Times

Asia Biz Today

Asian Money Guide

Our classes are delivered through two models:

• As holiday camps, and
• As online lessons

We do not have a fixed centre. Our holiday camps are held at various centrally located venues such as City Hall (Downtown), Ayer Rajah (West), and Mountbatten (East). Please check the camp page to see where the specific location is.

For our online lessons, they are conducted through a video conference - so students can log in and join the class comfortably from home. Or wherever they are.

Our unique value proposition and differentiating factors:

1. Our teachers are practitioners - Ex-MOE teachers and Curriculum Director of The Keys Academy, serial entrepreneurs, Lead UX Designer at Grab...These are just a brief of the background of our teachers. 
2. Real-world applicability - Students don't just learn for the sake of learning. They will also put themselves to the test as they apply their new-found knowledge on real-world corporate challenges.
3. Convenient - Why be obsessed with limiting screen time? Could we instead think of how we can help our kids become creators of technology instead of consumers? 2 hours a week spent learning a relevant skill that will help their future, in the comfort of your own house, without the need for parents to send them to one more class. Now isn't that a winner?

And we had our own kids go through these courses!

For holiday camps: We have a maximum size of 20 per camp, and we maintain a 1:10 teacher to student ratio. Your child will usually work in pairs or small groups of 3-4 students throughout camp, whenever they are building robots or their business. Your children's learning experience and enjoyment, as well as safety, is our top priority

For online classes: The class size is 4 to 10 students per class.

There are 2 key reasons:

1. To facilitate regional collaboration and community: The more students that learn together, the more collaboration, the more cool, fantastic, groundbreaking ideas! 
2. To make it affordable for you: There are some classes out there, but at double our prices. We believe in making future-skills education accessible to all, not just the rich, and this will allow us to do

That being said, we monitor all the classes closely and should the teachers and us feel that the class is too big to give our students the learning they deserve, we may take steps to adjust the class size.

We run camps in several different locations. Please refer to the location stated in the camp details page.

For year-end of 2019, all our camps will be held at Trehaus Funan, walking distance from City Hall MRT.  

We specialise in inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary camps.

We believe that at a young age, children should (1) explore the different topics and gain a wide perspective, (2) be able to see how the different subjects fit together. Because the world doesn't function in silos.

Our Innovation Junior Camp and Change The World Camp, for example, lets children learn coding, robotics and entrepreneurship in a week. At the end of camp, they will typically get an idea of what they enjoyed best - and this allows them (and you) to decide what specific skill they want to hone.

They also apply tech skills and design thinking skills to ideate a startup (entrepreneurship), culminating in a pitch presentation which relies on how they creatively thought about solving problems (literally, the way students are taught to come up with ideas is by thinking - "What problem do I want to solve in the world?") and how they split the work and collaborated.

Check out our student creations gallery  

Nope! Our camps are designed for children with little or no experience in coding or robotics.

If your child already has some experience in coding or robotics, do let us know beforehand so that we can advise on suitability, and we can also arrange for more advanced challenges and tasks for your child during the camp - we want to make sure they are learning new things!

For certain camps which has a pre-requisite, such as the Young Founders Camp or a Change The World or Innovation Junior Level 2 Camp, the requirement will be clearly stated in the camp page. Typically, this requires your child to have attended our past camps (or other tech camps) before.

For our holiday camps, we provide FULL refund if the cancellation is made at least 30 days before the camp start date.

In the unfortunate circumstance that we have to cancel a camp, you will receive a full refund. 

Young Founders Summit Global originated from Los Angeles, in partnership with Founders Bootcamp, the world's first high school startup accelerator. 

After 4 years of testing and learning, the current YFS has evolved into an accelerator program not unlike YC and 500 Global accelerators. After going through our YFS Academy and live online masterclasses, elite teams are selected to advance through to receive 1 on 1 mentorship. Teams will incorporate their companies, build their prototype, get real customers, culminating in investor pitches to get funding. Some teams reach this "Fund-raising" stage sooner, some later, because no two teams are the same.

In the past, teams have secured between USD50,000 to USD500,000 of equity funding!

Our supporters include UNDP, Peking University in Beijing, AWS Educate, and more.

Our mission is to make entrepreneurial mindset and skillset accessible to Generation Zs globally. We believe that by nurturing Gen Zs’ changemaker heartset, combined with digital-first innovation, it will unleash a future world that is inclusive, accessible, and sustainable.

We hope for YFS to be a hub and platform for GenZs who want to be leaders, changemakers and impact creators to convene, get mentorship, support and funding.  

As a Top 30 Semi-Finalist, you'll enjoy:

• Startups office tours
• Fireside chats with founders
• Mentorship from global experienced entrepreneurs and experts 
• Live online workshops
• Official certificate and/or POAP

Top 10 teams further get access to:

• Potential grant funding of $5,000 to $20,000
• POAP
• Other prizes

We asked past participants this question, and here are the top answers as to why THEY joined:

1. Validation: 

It's a chance to get your idea(s) validated by real entrepreneurs and investors. Is there real meat to your idea and business plan, and how would you get there? Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?

2. Great exposure and learning opportunity: 

It's an experience that you would never have gotten in school.Our contestants had the chance to visit Facebook's office in Singapore, heard from serial entrepreneurs and inspiring speakers, and met fellow entrepreneurs from all over Asia. 

Many of our previous students have said they learned more in our program than the rest of high school combined. In addition to the raw content and core skills, you will learn how to take initiative and approach challenges, which will serve you for the rest of your life.

3. It doesn't end at the competition:

If you leave a strong impression but don't win, you might still be able to receive funding and mentorship anyway. Last year, 2 finalist teams did not receive an award during the Finals. But post-Finals, they continued to make good progress on their businesses and ended up getting admitted to the Founders Bootcamp program and continue getting mentorship and funding anyway!

4. It seems cool:

You're treated like adult founders, you pitch like adult founders, you're part of this cool start-up thing that's all the rage right now. It's pretty cool. And if you make concrete progress on your startup and produce a polished pitch, that would look VERY impressive on your resume, independent of how you perform in the competition. Colleges, employers, and investors tend to highly value real world experience. (The co-founder of Founders Bootcamp sits on the admission committee of MIT and interviews university applicants, so hear it from him).

Not everyday would you get the chance to be treated and viewed on par as a young adult - where your ideas are worthy of being invested in, and not dismissed. There's a group of entrepreneurs and investors ready to invest their time and money in you - if you go for it - so why wouldn't you?

You decide.

Young Founders Summit Asia is open to all students aged between 12 to 18. From anywhere in the world.

This is open to any student (as long as you're aged 12 to 18, and not studying full-time in a university), from anywhere. (We don't limit it to just Asia!)

Since 2021, we had over 1,600 students from 12 countries apply. Applicants have come from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, China and Hong Kong, Japan, Philippines, Cambodia, UAE and more. 

1. Now - 30 September: After you sign up, you will get access to join our Young Founders Summit Academy. There, you will receive guidance notes, tutorials and materials which will guide your team to prepare your killer video pitch and pitch deck
2. 30 September: Deadline for teams to submit (1) 8 minute video pitch and (2) Pitch deck
3. By 10th October : Announcement of Top 30 teams who are invited to the Semi-Finals
4. Early October - Early December: Over the next 8 weeks, Semi-Finalists shall receive mentorship via video conference leading up to the Summit
5. The Summit (December): Semi-Finalists shall attend the Summit (comprising of the founder chats, networking events, Semi-Finals, and Finals)!

This year's Demo Day will be held at the MAD > Today Summit in Singapore! The Top 30 teams will be invited to it, and to

1. Pitch your business to a panel of esteemed investors and entrepreneurs 
2. Enjoy office tours of startups in Singapore, hear the stories of brave entrepreneurs, and learn what it takes to be a successful one - we'll be inviting cool, inspiring speakers!
3. Network with each other - meet 100 aspiring young founders like yourself from all over Asia!

We'll also be hosting a fun dinner for everyone to get to know each other and mingle!

It Is Free to Join

You do not have to pay anything to learn through our online entrepreneurship course, and to submit your idea.

A winning team is one which has a well thought out business proposal that: 

1. Has a real market (people actually want to buy your product), and
2. Is feasible (it's actually doable/build-able, and not just with a fancy "powered by AI" word thrown in - when you have zero knowledge of AI)

Which is why we've curated a group of mentors who are experienced in entrepreneurship, innovation, start-ups and will guide you on what to do.

What will they be doing?

If you're one of the Semi-Finalist team, you will be paired with a mentor, who will guide you throughout your 8-week preparation towards the Summit in December. 

You are getting private access to these entrepreneurs and experts and the chance to tap into their brilliant minds.  

Now that's access that you normally don't get, don't you think?

You do not need to an idea or a team to sign up.

You can get started now and go through the online entrepreneurship course first!

However, by 30 September, you will need to have formed a team and prepared a business pitch together, to qualify.

Sign up here.

The short answer is that you can’t. If you’re very concerned, you can limit your pitch to the rough outline of the idea without giving away key information.

The longer answer is that this is not something worth worrying about. Unless you are confident your idea is a ‘key-in-hand’, easy-to-implement innovation that hasn’t been thought of yet, the advantages gained from getting broad-based feedback and a strong team motivated by collective ownership far outweigh the remote risks of someone stealing and executing on your idea. 

The truth is that over 90% of ideas pitched have already been pitched - probably many times - in the past. This doesn’t imply that the idea isn’t a good one, but rather that what truly matters is how well you and your team execute the idea. “One can steal ideas, but no one can steal execution or passion”

In Selecting the Top 30, We Look For:

1. Market opportunity - is your product/ service really needed?
2. Feasibility - is your team (with some learning and help) able to make this product/ service?
3. Innovativeness - Is it clear what your product/ service's unique value proposition is?

Note: The above are indicative only and the co-organizers reserve the right to make changes to the judging criteria. The selection decisions lie at the sole discretion of the co-organizers and the co-organizers are not obliged to disclose or provide any reasons for their decision.

Absolutely NOT! On the contrary, we actually do not want not-for-profit ideas. 

We are looking for sustainable businesses, that have positive impact. 

An fashion line using unwanted fabric.

A vertical urban farm.

A jobs platform for blue-collared workers.

A gig economy platform connecting businesses in Singapore with gig workers in Cambodia, Myanmar, etc.

"Positive impact" can come in many views. Educating more kids in India, creating more jobs for people..these are all positive impact!

Our lessons, both online and offline, are based on a 4C1R pedagogy: Each seeks to cultivates Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Creativity, Communication, and Resilience.

We currently offer the following topics:

• Coding
• Robotics
• Entrepreneurship
• Design Thinking
• Financial Literary

Does e-learning work?

Has your child ever learnt to make something by watching Youtube?
Slime or some DIY project? Or maybe Minecraft? Or how to play a musical instrument?

The kids of today are so different from us. They learn differently. And they should - because the world has evolved.

But of course, our top priority is to ensure that School of Mastery is effective in teaching kids.

It's LIVE

Not pre-recorded. Students and teachers interact real-time.
They can ask questions and have them answered.
They collaborate with fellow classmates in breakout rooms.
They get called out if they are not paying attention. And you, the parent, will be informed.

Supplementary learning materials

Valuable resources available to students during and post-course:
Video playback of the lessons (in case your child missed a class or simply wants to go revise something taught)
Weekly lesson materials

We're always open to hearing from students and parents on how to make this even better. Drop us a note at hello@smarterme.sg, anytime!

The Online courses are typically weekly, 2 hours every week.

Students have to log in to the platform on the set day and time - like a video conference.

We currently have a pre-recorded online course for entrepreneurship. Originally available only to Young Founders Summit participants, it is now available for all interested students.

This course consists of on-demand lessons covering the entrepreneurship topics which we generally cover in our Bootcamps: Ideation, Selection criteria, Market targeting and sizing, Customer design and interviews, Competitive analysis, Lean Canvas, and Making Money. We expect teams to take 15 - 25 hours from start until 31 August 2019 to go through these videos and work on the assignments given to prepare your pitch deck

Students will also receive a Starter Account with AWS Educate :

1. USD50 worth of AWS credits, with which you can consume cloud services available on AWS
2. Access to AWS Educate's curated content to learn about Cloud Computing, App Developer, Web Development Engineer, Machine Learning Scientist
3. Earn digital badges (Cloud Literacy, Robomaker, DeepRacer, Alexa, Gaming and more) that showcases your digital skills