Students explore science, for innovative solutions to global issues
Students present their ideas via the Internet.
About 530 middle school students in Shanghai showed off their innovative ideas at a science competition, covering trending topics in frontier science development, such as China's neutrality targets, space exploration and aging society.
The Shanghai Youth Science Ideas & Practice Challenge, hosted by the Shanghai Education Center of Science and Art, requires students to give full play to their imagination and creativity to tell stories about how science and technology have changed society in English, in a bid to promote science education in the public.
It attracted over 23,000 middle school students around the city this year, with 530 selected to present their ideas in front of the judges, at a city-wide presentation event in Qingpu District over the weekend.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, students participated via the Internet.
Tan Xinyuan, a ninth grader at Shanghai Huayao Baoshan Experimental School, presents her ideas on nitrogen fixation.
Tan Xinyuan, a ninth grader at Shanghai Huayao Baoshan Experimental School, presented photosynthetic nitrogen fixation as a way to solve food crisis and reduce carbon emissions.
She said she chose the topic after thinking about urgent international and domestic issues, such as the food crisis brought by the Russia-Ukraine war, and a rise in extreme heat worldwide.
"How should we cope with climate change and the population crisis? How should China fulfill its target to reach its carbon emission peak by 2035? I thought about all these ideas when thinking about the topic," Tan said.
Another student program focuses on gene-edited plants.
To develop her initial ideas into a mature solution, she studied related knowledge in biology, chemistry, geography and English while locked down at home, and discussed with her teachers and classmates.
"To be frank, I was not that interested in science articles at first. I registered for the event only because it was in English," she said. "But in the process, I gradually began to like reading popular science books. These articles not only taught me English expressions and scientific knowledge, but also helped me develop scientific exploration methods. Though it was painful to revise my paper again and again after discussions, I felt full of sense of achievement."
