Student Tech Zone

April - October 2023

STEM Challenge

The STEM Challenge is a project-based competition in which secondary school students have to team up to study a specific topic in Engineering. It aims to develop students’ active learning attitudes and critical thinking skills via experiments. With the supervision of CityU academic staff and the facilitation of student mentors in each team, participants can gain experiences in a learning environment outside the classrooms.

IT-related Project Themes:

(1) Smart City Prototypes

Project Description:
Smart city is a concept of using advanced technologies for sustainable city planning and development. It includes the use of various sensors to collect specific data from citizens, devices, or infrastructures, and extract information from the collected data for efficient assets, resources, and services management. Students will design and develop a specific prototype and demonstrate its relevance to smart city development with the use of coding techniques and IoT technologies. Examples of such prototypes include intelligent pest control, energy and waste management, and infrastructure monitoring systems

(2) Smart Transport and Logistics

Project Description:
The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have enabled the collection of transportation data, exchange of information, and implementation of traffic control actions via the internet or various vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) / vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication networks. Students will design and develop various prototypes for intelligent traffic control frameworks that can fully incorporate the capability of the emerging IoT-based sensing, computing, and control technologies. Examples include intelligent traffic lights, autonomous vehicles, smart parking, inventory control and logistic systems.

(3) AIoT Design and Prototyping

Project Description:
Students will develop hardware and software models for prototyping AI and IoT projects. Students will be guided to identify an IoT application in our daily lives and identify AI techniques to improve application. Fundamental programming skills and basic electronics knowledge will be applied in this challenge, with guidance from senior university students.

(4) ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) Robotics

Project Description:
Students will join CityU ROV Team as junior members to gain some insight into underwater robotic development. Contestants are required to make use of their engineering and technology knowledge to design and build a robot in accordance with the competition rules. More information on the contest can be found at: https://materovcompetition.org/.

(5) Sumo Robot

Project Description:
Sumo wrestling is Japanese traditional competitive wrestling in which a wrestler attempts to force an opponent out of the ring or to make contact with the ground with any part of his body other than the soles of his feet (usually by throwing, shoving or pushing). The Sumo robot tries to mimic the Japanese traditional competition. Each team will use a Lego Mindstorms set to design, build and program a Sumo robot to push another Sumo robot out of the activity zone or flip over with a designed mechanical attacking mechanism. Each team will also need to design some basic mechanical defending principles to make it difficult for the opponent to flip its mobile robot over or push it out of the activity zone. In addition, students will learn how to use Scratch programming language to develop an intelligent sumo robot through the integration of sensors, actuators and software programs. CityU can lend Lego Mindstorms sets to successful applicants in the STEM Challenge project.

(6) Robots for Mars/Moon Exploration

Project Description:
Explorations of unknown areas on Mars or Moon surface are very challenging topics. The robot should be able to move on very rough ground, in unknown and unstructured environments with limited power and limited surrounding information. Therefore, the structural design, moving mechanism, driving power and control should all be well considered and optimised, such that the robot can pass obstacles/gaps/stairs/sandy or muddy ground, avoid collision and turnover, steer efficiently, and save its energy, etc. In this project, students can try to study how to design a “smart” robot with new ideas to achieve one or several goals mentioned above. Students will demonstrate the robot prototype in a self-designed environment, with Lego pieces or other appropriate materials.

(7) Online Platform for Control of Automated Guided Robot

Project Description:
The automated guided vehicle (AGV) is useful to use in factories, warehouses and the logistics industry. This project aims to develop an online demo/simulation system using HTML and Unity coding. A physical AGV robot is also provided to test their coding.