An international school teacher from Penang, Darren Lim, was awarded the Coach of the Decade at the 2023 World Scholar’s Cup Global Round in Seoul, South Korea recently.
This award is given every five years and recognizes a coach who contributes actively to the World Scholar’s Cup academic competition through producing consistently high levels of student performance as well as being actively involved in the World Scholar’s Cup community for a period of ten years or more.
The geography teacher and debate coach from Prince of Wales Island International School here received the accolade in recognition of his efforts in the past decade for –
– establishing the World Scholar’s Cup competition Regional Round in Penang
– expanding the competition’s reach across Malaysia
– coaching teams that delivered consistently excellent results in the past decade, including the overall champion of the team debating event in the 2018 World Scholar’s Cup Global Round.
The World Scholar’s Cup was founded in 2007 in South Korea by Stanford and Harvard scholar, Daniel Berdichevsky, the World Scholar’s Cup is an international academic competition organized by non-profit organization, Demidec, and participated by more than 15,000 students across 65 countries.
This program aims to teach students interesting contemporary and historical lessons that are not taught in classrooms, develop their essential life skills such as critical thinking, debating and teamwork, as well as foster a global community of young scholars across backgrounds and statuses.
Students compete in teams of three across four events, namely quiz challenge, quiz bowl, team writing and team debate.
Teams begin their World Scholar’s Cup journey at a local round (dubbed “Regional Round”), where teams that meet the point threshold of 20,000 points out of 40,000, will qualify for one of several semi-final rounds known as Global Rounds. The top 10% of teams at each Global Round will be invited to the Tournament of Champions, held each November at Yale University.
The World Scholar’s Cup is important to our education system because it is a wholesome program that develops cognitive and oratorical skills of Malaysian students and encourages global participation, as per the National Education Plan 2013-2025. Through their participation, our students are able to benchmark their English language, scientific and general knowledge as well as soft skills internationally against fellow contestants from around 50 countries, including China, Canada, Australia, Vietnam and Japan.
Lim’s passion to share the benefits of the program with the Penang school community led him to bring the program to Penang in 2015, hosted by the Prince of Wales Island International School. Since then, more than 2,500 scholars from across Malaysia have experienced the rigorous academic training and high standards of competition afforded by the program. It has directly built a large contingent of globally-minded future intellectuals and leaders.
The Malaysian regional rounds have produced world champion teams at the World Scholar’s Cup Global Rounds and Tournament of Champions in 2018, 2019 and 2022.
The Prince of Wales Island International School team also won first place in the junior category team debate event of the 2018 Global Round and 9 th place overall junior category team at the 2023 Global Round.
