Tech
Galaxy
Award
tga.org
Our
mission.
The Tech Galaxy Award exists because the next generation will inherit cities, AI systems, and climate constraints we have not solved. They will not inherit our questions — they will inherit our failure to ask them well.
TGA was founded on a single conviction: that the secondary school and university years are exactly the right time for serious thinking about technology and society. Students at this stage can hold contradictions adults have learned to ignore. They can ask why a system is the way it is without first asking how to defend it.
We do not train students for a competition. We give them the conditions under which they can do real intellectual work — and we recognize them, distinctly, when they do.
Four pillars.
Drawn from the OECD Learning Compass 2030 and the World Economic Forum's AI Literacy for Youth framework, four commitments shape every cohort.
01
AI literacy as a worldview, not a tool
Students learn what AI is, what it isn't, and what it costs — before learning how to deploy it. Worldview precedes API call.
02
Urban design as justice, not infrastructure
A city is not its buildings. It is the distribution of opportunity its buildings encode. Designs are evaluated against this standard.
03
Education as agency, not memorization
No team advances by recalling. They advance by defending. Every output must survive a question the team did not anticipate.
04
Cities as ecosystems of values
Public space, mobility, housing, climate, civic trust — every system carries values. We ask which values, and whose.
Why these
students.
Most STEM programs target either younger children (whose engagement is play-based) or working professionals (whose portfolios are already shaped). The secondary-school and university years are routinely under-served as the years for serious systems thinking — and they are when the most consequential intellectual habits form.
Students at this stage can hold systems-level analysis. They have not yet internalized the adult instinct to defend an opinion before testing it. They can be asked, with a straight face, "why should this exist?" — and they will attempt a real answer.
We chose this window because it is structurally rare, pedagogically rich, and morally urgent. The habits formed here travel forward for decades.
Why
Singapore.
Singapore is not a backdrop. It is the curriculum.
Few cities in the world combine, at this density, the conditions TGA requires: a Smart Nation policy framework with public data infrastructure, multiple Tier-1 universities within reach of one another, a multiethnic civic compact that makes urban-justice questions visible, and an AI governance approach that is neither libertarian nor authoritarian.
Teams spend their middle days outside the seminar room — in transit nodes, housing precincts, civic spaces. Singapore lets us ask urban-design questions with the city itself as a working answer-key.
Global alignment.
TGA's curriculum and rubric are mapped against international frameworks so that participation translates back to schools, scholarship committees, and university admissions worldwide.
UN SDG 11
Sustainable cities & communities — TGA's anchor SDG.
OECD Compass 2030
Learning Compass & transformative competencies framework.
WEF AI Literacy
AI Literacy for Youth, World Economic Forum.
UNESCO 2030
Education for Sustainable Development agenda.
IB ATL
Approaches to Learning categories, IB.
Smart Nation
Singapore's national digital framework.
URA Singapore
Urban Redevelopment Authority — partner data & site access.
Global Urban Futures
Research community shaping our curriculum review.
Partners
& faculty.
Faculty mentors and judges are drawn from our four anchor academic partners — NUS, NTU, the University of Hong Kong, and the University of Cambridge — and from allied research and policy institutions. Schools, learning centers, and corporate partners join TGA each year as cohort sponsors, mentors, or media affiliates.
Become a partner- Academic: NUS · NTU · HKU · Cambridge
- Policy: Urban Redevelopment & Smart Nation partners
- For schools: Academic alignment documents · co-branded delivery · team prep
- For teachers: Training & Galaxy Mentor certification
- For corporates: Cohort sponsorship · award sponsorship · media affiliation
If this matters
to you, too.
Read how the cohort unfolds, see how the Galaxy honors are conferred, or write to us about bringing a team — or a school — to the next year.
See the format Talk to us