Overseas trip to Outwards Bound of Singapore

It was a fun filled trip to OBS. This event in my opinion was similar to the interactive courses conducted at NACLI in Buona Vista. Instead of the boring lectures, more outdoor activities were conducted and more discussions were done with the theme “Community Engagement Programme.” In the end, it ended up in a discussion about racial issues. Nevertheless, it was my first time visiting Outward Bound of Singapore, and my first time venturing into the end part of Punggol where bus service 82 plies.


I never had expected that the end part of Punggol Rd is a narrow one lane road since double decker buses were deployed on service 82 before the North East Line rationalisation exercise conducted at June 2003. I heard that there were many famous seafood restaurants and eateries situated in that area but unfortunately, I still had no idea where they were currently. So inside OBS, the participants participated in several activities like punching the keys, crossing the rivers, solving the puzzle and stop moving. Many of these games entailed teamwork, cooperation and trust. These three words seem to be mentioned frequently throughout the one day course.


However, the most memorable game that I had played was solving the puzzle. Initially, the participants were broken up into seven groups. These seven groups had their own “hula hoops” and in each of these “hula hoops”, there was an empty jigsaw puzzle board. Thereafter, each group gets an envelope each containing the pieces of the puzzle inside. After that, in the first round, the timings for each of the groups were recorded. Therefore, we were expected to complete the puzzle at the fastest time.


Several assumptions were made. When the group opened up the envelope, it was assumed that the pieces of puzzle inside were the pieces of puzzle of our own jigsaw puzzle board. In the end, the puzzle pieces of the seven jigsaw puzzles were all mixed up. I think that created an impetus to search frantically for the puzzle pieces for the respective jigsaw puzzle. Some of the groups were searching for their puzzle pieces while other groups conveniently took the puzzle pieces from other groups, assuming that some of them were in their jigsaw puzzle board. For our group, we had pieced some of the “possible” puzzle pieces together but later discovered that this group of puzzle pieces do not belong to this jigsaw puzzle board. In the end, the fastest timing is 3 minutes and 31 seconds and the slowest timing is 8 minutes and 55 seconds.


For the second round, instead of taking the timings for the individual groups, the leaders of the seven groups met together and set target timing for the slowest group to complete. The target timing is set at 5 minutes but in the end, the slowest group took 2 minutes and 30 seconds. There were several factors for that. First, many of us had already familiarised with the layout and content of our respective puzzle pieces. Experience does count in doing things efficiently. Second, it seems that cooperation is more efficient in getting things done in this case since we were interdependent of each other.


I will like to take this opportunity to thank the trainers for making their weekend in imparting us the knowledge through interactive games and the linking to the application of the knowledge learnt back to the society. Several issues such as venturing towards racial harmony instead of stopping at racial tolerance and so on were identified during the course. Although no concrete solutions have been drafted out, at least more people are aware of the problem. I hope that a good solution for this issue can “appear” in due time.