Student inventions on display in virtual exhibition

Thirty-seven inventions and creative ideas by students in Shanghai are now on display on the website of the China (Shanghai) International Technology Fair.

The annual event was scheduled to be held from April 16 to 18 but was postponed to next year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Exhibitors are still invited to show their work on the website (www.csitf.com) all year round.

Since 2019, the fair began displaying contributions by young people to encourage them to participate in innovation.

Previously, the Shanghai Educational Center of Science and Art, Shanghai Youth Institute of Science and Technology and Shanghai Maker Education Alliance would guide young students in scientific and technological innovation projects, intellectual property protection and business operation and select more than 20 creative inventions each year to present them at the fair.

This year, the activities were organized online due to the pandemic outbreak. About 30 mentors delivered lectures, trainings and individualized instruction through WeChat and phone calls.

Eventually, 37 projects were selected to be on display at the online exhibition, with 18 already granted patents or under patent application.

As artificial intelligence is a popular topic, many projects showed students’ creative ideas on how to make life and studies more convenient with the technology.

Chen Sizhe from Shanghai Baoshan Gucun Experimental School designed an intelligent assistant for turning sheet music pages. It uses the Arduino UNO single-chip microcomputer to control the rotation of steering gears and magnets to grip the paper and accurately control the number of pages to be turned over. It uses gestures or a speech recognition module to intelligently control turning of the pages. It is also equipped with self-learning software to make automatic page turning possible.

Ti Gong

A group of students from Pudong Huagao Primary School designed an AI-based book-lending app. By taking a picture of a student holding a book, the application of artificial intelligence can identify the borrower and the book at the same time, and then add them to the records of the borrowing system. The borrower can return the book also by scanning the cover with the machine. Using this intelligent app, the class librarian in the school can register the book borrowing and returning records in 2 seconds, reducing the time of manual recording greatly.

Lu Yihan, a student from Xinsong Middle School in Minhang District, designed an intelligent platform for community book sharing.

With WeChat, residents in a community can put books in the machine to create a sharing cloud library and share them with their neighbors. Users can make reservations via WeChat for borrowing and returning, thus realizing the self-service intelligent transmission and sharing of books.