Jonathan Y. H. Sim
沈耀发

Fellow
NUS Teaching Academy

Lecturer
Department of Philosophy
Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
National University of Singapore


Jonathan Y. H. Sim (沈耀发) is a Fellow at the NUS Teaching Academy, and a Lecturer with the Department of Philosophy, at the National University of Singapore, where he teaches the Philosophy of Computing and Data Analytics and Chinese philosophy to both undergraduates and working professionals. He also teaches philosophy to the elderly as part of a collaboration between NUS and the National Silver Academy. For his passion in teaching and his effective teaching innovations, Jonathan won the University’s Annual Teaching Excellence Award (ATEA) in 2024; and the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (FTEA) in 2019, 2021, and 2022.

He is passionate about preparing his students to make an impact in society, and thus he has been mentoring and supervising many humanities and social science students for corporate internships in tech-related roles; and he has also been training many undergraduates to become effective and engaging educators under the University Teaching Opportunities Programme (UTOP).

Jonathan has a special interest in crossing beyond disciplinary boundaries in the search for fascinating new insights to address age-old problems. It is for this reason that he has worked with Nobel Laureates (such as the late Sydney Brenner who discovered mRNA) and many top academics around the world to publish books on critical world issues, such as “Grand Challenges for Science in the 21st Century” (New Jersey: World Scientific, 2018), “Buying Time for Climate Action” (New Jersey: World Scientific, 2021), and “Fit for Purpose? The Futures of Universities” (New Jersey: World Scientific, 2022).

For his passion in sharing the joys of philosophy, and his knowledge of philosophy across a spectrum of applied issues, he has been invited to discuss philosophical issues on a variety of issues ranging from AI and its impact on education and society, to other pressing issues such as the future of work, for the Business Times, Channel New Asia, China Global TV Network, the Financial Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post, and TODAY News.

Teaching | Publications | Talks, Lectures, and Workshops | Media Interviews & Mentions | Music | Resources | Ask Me Anything! | Contact

Currently Teaching

GEI1001/GET1050 Computational Reasoning. A fun and exciting module that teaches undergraduate students (from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) how to employ computational methods to solve problems, and philosophically reflect on the social and ethical issues that arise in the creation of models and implementation of algorithms.

GET1050 Teaching Team v2.0
(AY2019/2020 Sem II)
The Pioneer GET1050 Teaching Team
(AY2019/2020 Sem I)

UTOA2001PH Undergraduate Teaching Opportunities Programme. There are two tracks that students can enrol in: (1) The Teaching Track, where students learn classroom management techniques, how to question and diagnose students’ level of mastery over the subject, and other pedagogical techniques to become effective teachers in the classroom as they undergo mentorship and on-the-job training teaching undergraduate tutorials in NUS. (2) And the Learning Design Track, where students learn the nuts and bolts of good pedagogy, lesson design, and assessments, and how to conduct education research to measure the efficacy of the learning activities they have crafted – and they will undergo mentorship and on-the-job training as they design new learning activities and conduct research in NUS.

Pioneer batch of Undergraduate Teaching Assistants and their mentors (senior Undergraduate Teaching Assistants) under UTOA2001PH
UTOA2001PH Training of New Teaching Assistants, a collaboration with the Centre for Design of Teaching and Learning (CDTL) in NUS


What Students Have to Say about GEI1001/GET1050 Computational Reasoning

GEI1001/GET1050 helped me to get an internship and it’s very relevant to my work!

  • Hi Jonathan! Just wanted to drop a message saying that I cannot believe I am facing people in internship that didnt even quantify their parameters and had to go through mini GET on what is best and how do we define best and what are the proxy measures we are doing. Can definitely see the application of GET again cause it felt like I was transported back into your class of discussions
  • Hope that you are doing well : ) Hope this isn't too random haha but I wanted to send you an appreciation email for making GET1050 so fun and enriching! I learnt a lot from your lectures and tutorials and enjoyed them very much. They were really insightful as well! I really appreciated your encouragement during the vba consultation too. Thanks to excel I managed to get an internship this break and gained more confidence in learning other tech skills xD Thank you so much for going out of your way to help us, creating such a fun learning environment and challenging us to think. This mod was my favourite one this semester! Stay safe and take care and hope to see you around in school!!
  • I was your student of your mod last sem. Just want to share a story with you haha! I did horribly for your module due to the lack of time in the school semester. I got a 8/8- even when i contributed a big portion of project works that scored decently well. As a result, i decided to prioritize other mods, neglecting VBA which was the latter portion of the module. During the CB, i decided to pick up VBA, and went through some of the notes you had and youtube. This helped me to secure a banking internship in a tough period, during the interviews, the head mentioned that she wanted someone to automate excel, and I listed some of the examples i saw on youtube, impressing her. Fast forward 2 weeks into my internship, other than small projects, i just created a excel sheet to automate manual intranet web queries and print them(For compliance against terrorism etc, intranet will show whether company suspicious or not) for my team! Saving my teammates 30 mins-ish a day.
  • hey prof!! how has this cb been for you? :) hope youre doing well HAHA i got my first job this vacation and my boss gave me this huge excel data set and asked me to categorise the data and all thank God i took GET1050 be i managed to use pivot table and filter function to get the data that my boss wanted and it took me less than 5min, my boss was so impressed HAHAH thank you prof!! hope this little news will bring you some happiness this gloomy cb :)
  • It has been really wonderful learning VBA from the module in particular. I couldn't imagine that I'll be learning programming in FASS. At least now with basic VBA skills in my belt, I hope for more useful things to come! Perhaps one thing of interest to you: I'm currently interning in the oil and gas sector. One of my tasks was to prioritize a list of interests for the firm, which was compiled in a spreadsheet. Evidently it'll be exhaustive to go thru each interest one by one (there was a lot). So my bosses would like me to justify how I'd prioritize it. This is similar to the optimisation exercises we went through in the module. I'd like to believe that they allow me to have a thinking framework in place for these kinds of tasks.


GEI1001/GET1050 has empowered me!

  • Beyond thanking you for the obviously tremendous amount of effort and humour that you put in this mod in order to make it bearable, enjoyable, and educational; I would like to thank you for giving me a good springboard into this world of data science and computing. After seeing the value of computing knowledge and thinking from this module, I recently took up a certified business analytics course and intend to do CS50 in due time as well. I also intend to strengthen my understanding of VBA (ps. do you have any recommendations of where I can do this other than Linkedln Learning? Philo mod recommendations also please thanks haha I haven't taken intro to Philo but I would love to learn how to think better) I am very proud to tell you that I got an A for this module. I had at the very start told you that I was scared of this module and prepared to SU it (and got scolded by you haha). I am hence extremely proud of not only the grade, but the effort me and my team put into this module and the learnings we got as a result; but also that I have a good grade to show you to thank you for your dedication and kindness.
  • Hi Mr Sim!!! (This is quite late) I just want to let you are an amazing prof and Thank you for doing some an amazing job in GET1050. Although it's only my first Y1, I can say this is probably my most favourite mod because of that way you deliver the teaching materials! (And partly cuz I got a high grade in it HAHAHA) It has also sparked within me an interest of coding and I have been doing the CS50 module to widen my knowledge of coding. I'm alr building my own homepage WOW As a FASS student, I didn't expect to have such knowledge within my academic life and I really thank you for introducing it to me and the other students! ALSOOO, I've been reading your Tellonym and your replies have been eye-opening and refreshing. Thanks for sharing your opinions and inspiring your students (especially FASS students)
  • hi mr sim, hope you're doing well! just wanted to let you know that i've taken up an online programming course and so many of the concepts that they're teaching were covered in get1050! for eg i just wrote a code in c using the greedy rule to solve a question. so really thank you for the past semester in this module, it's taught me to think about computing in a way that makes it much easier for me to write codes now!
  • However, I wanna let you know that the course you conducted, was really REALLY helpful for me. Acting as a bridge that guides us into the unknown, I actually FEEL REALLY EMPOWERED to take a new coding module, and refine my skills in excel. And this is really thanks to you. You gave me the room to leverage on my instinctive ability to reason and plan, to complete the complexities of the tasks of excel. For that, I am deeply grateful.


GET1050 is amazing!

  • Heelllo Jonathan!! Sending this a bit late but, I just wanted to say thank youuu. I personally had an amazing GET1050 learning experience the past sem! Thanks for creating such a comfortable learning environment for asking questions and putting in so much effort to make learning so enjoyable!! (PARDON this not so look-a-like drawinggg HAHA)
  • Thank YOU for all your hardwork and love you have for your students:")) your dedication to this mod is amazing!!! :")) Rest well!!!!
  • I am a student from your GET1050 course. Though this email may be a little late, given that the module ended quite some time ago, the semester has finally concluded but I wish to extend my gratitude to you for having been such a passionate professor and I have genuinely learned much from your course. I really appreciate that you explain every single concept down to the last detail with so much enthusiasm. The amount of effort you and your GET1050 TAs is truly unimaginable, but I am very thankful for all of it! Thank you for building my foundation for EXCEL well and I can't wait to learn more tricks and codes! : D Thank you Jonathan once again :-), take care and rest well this summer!
  • Thank you so much for all you've done for us, Prof. Our group and all your other students are extremely grateful to you. We all enjoyed your whacky, hilarious lectures and will remember them for years to come. See you soon, Prof. Wishing you continued good health
  • hi prof! I wanted to say thank you for interacting with your students and spending your time to engage us in our growth :-) hope u r doing well in this season!!! :-))
  • Next, I want to sincerely thank you for being such a genuine and hardworking educator. In my entire education career as a student, I have only met one or two teachers who were always going the extra mile in getting to know their students and preparing their lessons in a way that students will truly enjoy and learn useful things they will take away with them for the rest of their lives. When I first entered university, I thought that the lecturers , in general , would be less enthusiastic about getting to know students or even teaching the content they do, as the material they teach would undoubtedly be repetitive on their end, and the opportunities they have to interact with students are less, considering the lecture group sizes and the number of classes they have with students. It was surprising when you went out of your way to get us email short introductions to you before our very first class, you did not have to, but you chose to do it. I honestly think that shows how much you care about your students and am touched to have an educator like you. This is just one of the many things, coupled with the crazy amount of effort you put into creating funny names in assignments and easter eggs for us to find when doing the assignments, that left me speechless. Your passion for teaching is admirable and shines through.
  • Dear Mr Sim, now that the mod is about to be over i just want to say a huge thank you to you- for your patience in coaching us, checking up on us whenever u can, and just being such a great prof. I am very lucky to have taken this mod under you, and i thank you so much for all the knowledge you have imparted to us. Ive started to be able to see proxy measures, interpretive gaps havjng to be filled in etc in my daily life as well. I hope you take good care of yourself, dont overtire yourself please! As your student, it is my pleasure and honour to call you my professor

Testimonials from Students

Here’s what former students have to say about Jonathan’s teaching:

Your 101% efforts, right down to the details don’t go unnoticed by me. What I appreciated most from your class was that you made it a point to make things relevant to us. I’m glad I took this module and I’m even more grateful that it was taught by you. I think the teachers we meet in our lives really do make a great impact on the learning outcomes and the subject matter at hand. Content might be king but engagement is truly queen. I’m glad that I had the chance to dip my toes into five other disciplines that I know close to nothing about. It was a very eye-opening class.

C. McColl (FASS)

Very energetic and very engaging. His class is so lively and fun! I look forward to attending his class all the way in University Town even after a long day’s work! Very sincere and real. His sharing in class is very beneficial to all students. Jonathan also shares openly about his thoughts and experiences, and he bring out greater sharings from the class. Extremely dedicated person.

Jonathan is very well prepared for his class. He summarizes all the notes from the videos, teaches from his powerpoint slides and prepare tutorials and goes thru with the class very systematically. He also encourages participation in class in a fun way by randomly assignment ‘fun’ roles to students.

V. Shaw (Executive Education)

Genuinely wants to help his students learn something from the module, and makes the effort to tweak his tutorials to make learning more effective.

Anonymous Student Feedback

Jonathan’s lessons stray away from the usual ‘textbook learning’ and focuses more on letting us learn by playing games or engaging in activities that he has planned. Furthermore, his feedbacks are very to the point and easy to understand, upon which we could improve on. His passion for this subject surpasses any TAs throughout my entire university life thus far. His lessons are also very catered to FASS students and through his games, we could see the hard work that he has placed in for this module. He is truly someone who can teach.

Anonymous Student Feedback

Thank you Jonathan! I thoroughly enjoyed GEQ1000 under your guidance and this module has been the complete opposite of the horror stories I’ve heard from my friends. They would tell me the module is bad but not explain why, so this makes me think they just can’t appreciate thinking! But you have truly helped us students hone our thinking skills, through the different schools of thinking.

I think the most enjoyable part of lessons is the very relevant and quirky examples raised in class, that not only helps to engage us students, but also keeps us on our toes because the examples like dating also is something we would like to find out more, on a personal basis.

Thank you for also always laughing with us and yourself, it really makes us at ease with how lighthearted classes can be, whilst still being so entirely enriching! This will be one of my most favourite modules throughout university!! :)

Anonymous Student Feedback

Jonathan always goes to the extra mile in order to ensure students are keeping up with the learning pace despite having a lot of commitments. Also, he’s a warm–hearted teacher who strives to take learning out of the classrooms by teaching us how theories can be applied to our reality. He’s always going the extra mile for students such as coming up with consultation slots for group, even answering questions in the middle of the night and being responsible by informing us if he cannot adhere to certain deadlines but still gives a reasonable deadline to feedback to his students.

Anonymous Student Feedback

He facilitates classroom interactions and asks thought provoking questions. He creates new and interesting activities for our tutorial class which involves everyone. He expresses genuine care and concern for us and goes beyond to connect with us on a personal level. He makes an effort to get to know each of us. Through his teaching, I have learnt life-long skills and this module has refined and left a strong impact on my thought processes.

Anonymous Student Feedback

He is a dedicated teacher whose passion is evident in the attention and care he shows his students. Furthermore, he goes above and beyond in ensuring that students know he is always there for them, be it for consultations or otherwise. His willingness to open up to students always brings back the human aspect of teaching – he shares about his personal life and experiences so we will feel more connected with him. Conversations are always two–way, and he doesn’t make students feel like he is merely a superior, but rather more like our equal who understands our struggles and who is willing to help.

Anonymous Student Feedback

He puts in significant effort in the preparation of his tutorials such as creating his own in-class activities and the role card method of getting his students more engaged in the discussion. He also makes his own slides which made complex concepts much easier to understand for me. Jonathan is also very enthusiastic and engaging in his teaching despite having to take a class that ends at 9pm.

Anonymous Student Feedback