A Creative Secondary School student who won the Roche Young Scientist Award invented a device to help people with dyslexia memorise brushstrokes via tactile learning
Matthew has won many honours for TacWrite. The classroom was empty when Matthew Kwan Ho-kwong looked up from his homework. All his kindergarten classmates had gone out to play, leaving him on his own. Matthew knew he was different – he just couldn’t figure out why.
Things became worse for Matthew when he entered primary school. He struggled with reading, writing, homework, and completing tests on time, and it wasn’t until Matthew’s parents took him to get tested that they found out that he was what doctors called “twice exceptional” – dyslexic and intellectually gifted at the same time.
Matthew remained unaware of this for years, as his parents worried that he would feel pressured to do as well as other gifted students. They needn’t have worried, though – when he was 14, Matthew invented a device that helps people with dyslexia better memorise Chinese characters.
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Matthew, who goes to Creative Secondary School and is now 18, admits that dyslexia can be a challenges to students like him – his writing speed is slow, and he sometimes confuses words that look or sound similar. In one test he took recently, he wrote “tense” when he wanted to write “dense”. Sometimes, in reading comprehension papers, he can even miss out entire paragraphs.
It was this feeling of frustration that comes from knowing that he could, and should, be doing better that led him in 2014 to create TacWrite – a translucent sandpaper-like writing pad that can be placed on top of a tablet.
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“The best thing about this pad is that you can learn [a lot, quickly] with just the sandpaper and a tablet,” he says. Users of TacWrite can trace, with their fingers, the characters that show up through the translucent textured pad to better memorise the order in which the strokes go. This is a form of tactile learning, in which learning takes place through physical activities or through the sense of touch.
Sourcing the materials he would need for it was not easy. Matthew had to turn to his mum, a designer, for help with reaching the paper suppliers. His hard work, though, paid off – TacWrite won him multiple honours, including the Roche Young Scientist Award in 2014 (a science competition for students organised by global health care company Roche), the city’s Top 10 Outstanding Youths Award in 2015, and the bronze award in the 2018 Asian International Innovation Award – in which he was the only teen contestant.
“I was quite shocked by the prizes I won,” Matthew admits. “But the most important thing is being able to help myself and other dyslexic students around the world.”
Matthew says that, in spite of his achievements, he still doesn’t really see himself as exceptional or different. “I don’t think humans can ever be perfect,” he says. “It is very normal to be good in one area, and bad in another. That’s essentially what my condition is.”
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The Form Six student is now taking a break from inventing to focus on his studies, as he will be taking his university entrance examinations in March. Should he do well, Matthew says he wants to pursue a degree in biology, with the end goal of one day becoming a zoologist. His advice for other young people struggling with their studies is to find their own passion to boost their self-esteem.
“Not everyone is good at studying,” he says, adding it’s important to find joy in something, even if it’s outside academics. “Finding a hobby can help you relax a bit and rediscover your worth.”