Hong Kong students are tapping into their scientific savvy by coming up with award-winning inventions to break down the barriers of everyday life.
“Connection” was the theme for the 49th Joint School Science Exhibition held last month, to promote creativity and scientific knowledge to help students enhance communication and improve our lives.
Founded in 1968, it is the largest annual exhibition run by local secondary school students.
Sponsored by the Innovation & Technology Commission, 150 local secondary schools took part in the event this year, along with entries from India, the Philippines, South Korea and the US.
Smart flowerpots
Pet owners can observe the behaviour of their pets to learn their needs, but it is a challenge for owners of plants to understand vegetational cravings.
The overall winner of this year's exhibition was a team of four Homantin Government Secondary School students.
They designed an intelligent flowerpot named Buddy Plant, which monitors the growth and needs of a plant, making communication between humans and foliage possible.
The team's Tina Yu said the flowerpot has three sensors.
"It consists of a humidity sensor, a light intensity sensor and also the temperature sensor. When the sensors detect the environment of the plant, then the users can get the information in three ways.
"First the display monitor, it will change to different colours to tell the users what environment of the plant is changing. Second is the speaker. When the plant is lacking water, the speaker will say [something] like 'I am so thirsty, please give me some water'. The third way is the webpage. The users can get the plant information on [their] phone through the Internet."
Tina and her colleagues hope Buddy Plant can boost people's interest in growing plants.
"We have discovered that most of my classmates are interested in planting but they don’t know how to plant or they have so many failed experiences. So we hope this product not only narrows down the distance between humans and nature but also can increase the interest in planting."
Barrier-free
Another group of student inventors are looking to create a barrier-free environment for visually impaired people.
Four Belilios Public School students came up with what they call "An eye for the blind" which detects obstacles for visually impaired people by using ultra-sonic waves.
The team's Celia Chan said: "It will accurately calculate distance. It will use sound to notify the user. If the pitch of the sound is higher it means the obstacle is nearer to the user. If the sound pitch is lower that means the obstacle is further away."
But like all inventions the tool still has limitations. It can only detect obstacles in front of the user and battery life is short, giving the students many difficulties to overcome throughout the production process.
"At first we could only use the buzzer to notify the user. But if we use the buzzer, nearby pedestrians will also hear the sound and it may disturb them. We did some research and found we can use headphones to notify the user, which is more convenient and causes less disturbance to people around."
Their idea won them the first runner-up prize in the exhibition's Proposal Competition.
They plan to improve the design to better aid visually impaired people.
