KUCHING: Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus will host its second state-level Young Innovators Challenge 2017 event on Saturday (July 8).
Young Innovators Challenge is an innovation competition targeting secondary school students from local, private and international schools in Malaysia, and who are in the age range of 14 to 17 years old.
An annual national competition, the competition aims to inspire passion for science, technology, engineering and mathematics among secondary school students, and develop their skills in problem-solving and thinking tenacity as well as expose them to open-source hardware and software.
The Australian university will host 118 students from 14 schools, including last year’s winners SMK St Joseph, Tunku Putra School and SMK Dato Patinggi Haji Abdul Gapor Stampin, from across the state to showcase their innovative projects using embedded systems with open source technologies.
An embedded system is a computer dedicated to performing a certain task using software or hardware for which the original source code and design are made freely available to users.
A total of 40 teams from participating schools will pitch their ideas and demonstrate their projects to a panel of judges who are experts in their respective industry.
This year, the teams are provided with six themes on which they can develop their ideas—food and agriculture, automotive/mobility, healthcare, home and shelter, heavy equipment and machinery, and retail and customer service.
Teams will decide on a challenge statement within the chosen themes after which they are to devise a solution to address a specific problem in the theme.
They will then be judged based on problem identification such as efforts made by the team to discover and understand problems, their in-depth analysis and research on the problem; usability of solution, and its simplicity and robustness of the solution design, as well as the impact of the solution during its implementation stage and its acceptance by targeted users.
Young Innovators Challenge 2017 will be held at Swinburne’s multipurpose hall and is open to the public from 2.30pm onwards. Members of the public are invited to visit the exhibition hall and to witness the participants’ solution designs which will be put on display.
Last year, SMK St Joseph bagged the inaugural Young Innovators Challenge championship trophy.