Brian Tang
Brian Tang is a Hong Kong-based social innovator, educator and lawyer.
Brian is the founder of Young Makers & ChangeMakers (YMCM), an inclusive platform and community to foster young maker mindsets, STEAM education and 21st century skills; and to empower youth to create innovative solutions for their communities and prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow.
Since 2014, YMCM has introduced numerous educational initiatives to Hong Kong, beginning with summer MakerCamps at multiple venues across Hong Kong, to organizing Global Cardboard Challenges, Star Wars Hour of Code (with Kids4Kids to benefit ethnic minority students) and Moonhack (with Code Club Australia using Scratch, Micro:bit and Python), as well as facilitating Cubes in Space student experiments that were launched on a NASA sounding rocket this summer.
More recently, with the support of the Education Bureau and Innovation and Technology Bureau, as well as diverse firms such as Alibaba Entrepreneur Fund, Cyberport, Google, Microsoft, WeWork and HKU School of Engineering, YMCM’s Technovation x #GirlsMakeTech program has engaged 550+ girls from 50+ schools across Hong Kong to ideate, prototype and pitch mobile app solutions to address the UN Sustainable Development Goals, mainly using MIT AppInventor, where Hong Kong’s top junior team won the 2017 Technovation World Pitch Finals in Silicon Valley. The programme has also supported the girls to further their SDG projects and even get funded.
Increasingly, YMCM is curating its own initiatives and curriculum that have been recognised as being world-class, ranging from mini Young Makeathons, standards-aligned lesson plans as part of the Fab Foundation’s Scaling a Community of Practice for Education in STEM through Digital Fabrication (SCOPES-df), young maker STEAM education teacher training for Teach4HK as part of the Jockey Club EDcubator program, and is currently developing an AI4SDG curriculum (having already run workshops on making your first chatbot to aid typhoon and other natural disaster victims).
Brian is a frequently invited speaker worldwide on maker education and technology entrepreneurship, hackathon judge and contributed a chapter on “Inclusive Young Maker Education” in the recently published The Field Guide to Hacking.
In addition, Brian is Managing Director of Asia Capital Markets Institute, an EdX instructor on Fintech that has reached more than 30,000 learners worldwide and a HKU adjunct associate professor where he is leads LITE Lab@HKU, an interdisciplinary and experiential program fostering law, innovation, technology and entrepreneurship.
Brian previously worked at a global investment bank in Hong Kong and at a Wall Street law firm in New York and in Silicon Valley, and hopes to better prepare his three young children for the future.