Prestige: Leading Ladies, Sheena Moh and Teo Jin Hui
Originally published on Prestige Malaysia.
Photos by PrestigeIn celebration of International Women’s Day 2022, Prestige Malaysia speaks to 10 extraordinary women who are paving the way for a better tomorrow for future generations. Next in the series, co-founders of Atom & the Dot Sheena Moh and Teo Jin Hui, share their experience of educating through play.
Inspired by the STEAM education movements and learning through play initiatives across the globe, Sheena Moh and Teo Jin Hui co-founded Atom & the Dot in 2017 with the mission of making learning fun and engaging. Their path to their shared business wasn’t so clear-cut, having branched off into separate careers prior to it. Sheena took on a consultant job after finishing her economics studies but later moved on to working in a bank before shifting again to a telco, where she developed its financial service products and became the product owner of its self-service app. After a long decade of hard work, she decides to take a sabbatical, learning to develop an app through a coding class while doing so. As for Jin Hui, she decided to forgo her engineering studies in favour of graphic design, after realising she spent more time “doodling than listening in class.” She then worked as a designer and later a marketer with a local water bottle brand.
Atom & the Dot, named after the most basic building block in science and the most basic element in art, offers activity boxes that combine storytelling in comic form to explain scientific theories with art and games to make the activities more engaging. Since the pandemic affected the schooling of many children, it has also been lending a helping hand through the Learning Box Project after being approached by Teach for Malaysia in 2020 to help develop custom activity boxes for rural communities. Together with Teach for Malaysia and Yayasan Hartalega, the Learning Boxes were delivered to 500 students over 6 months. Atom & the Dot has also since worked with SC Johnson and UBS. By the end of Quarter 1 2022, it will have sent out a total of 7,500 boxes to students in need.