Students compete in engineering competition

The 14th Shanghai Future Engineers Competition was held over the weekend with more than 1,300 local primary and secondary school students competing in engineering projects like structure design, robot making and artificial intelligence.

The annual competition, founded in 2004, attracted over 10,000 students across the city this year and some 1,300 of them stood out from the preliminaries. The results will be released on the official website of Shanghai Education Commission by the end of the year.

This year's contest has introduced a new section "AI Era  — Let Machines Hear", which requires the competitors to design an artificial intelligent program which can identify different verbal instruction and control the machines.

Among the AI project participants there were a team of two from Shanghai Zhenru High School who made an intelligent system for the management of balls at school. Telling the system the number and type of balls your class wants to borrow, the system will record it and let the machine allocate balls to designated place. The two students also said they are considering using face recognition technologies in this system to prevent students from claiming to be one with the other class and borrow extra balls.

Another two boys from the High School Affiliated to Shanghai University brought an intelligent mirror which can give voice reminders on occasions like ladies spending too much time on makeup and forgetting something. It can also remind you of what you should do today when you brush your teeth in the morning and answer your questions.

Besides artificial intelligence, the competition covers fields including mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, cybernation, industrial design, architecture and computer aided design.