One is a smart hydropower generator device that aims to reduce their school’s electric bill. Another is an intelligent imaging management system that monitors local pedestrian and road traffic. And another is a water level rise alert system that seeks to reinforce disaster mitigation and warning system protocols in a Yolanda-struck community.
What’s common in these three technologies?
These are not products of expert scientists or engineers—at least not yet—but of young high school students from Makati, Bataan, and Leyte.
These students also happen to be the first-ever recipients of the Youth Innovation Prize in the recently concluded imake.wemake: create. innovate. collaborate. of the Department of Science and Technology – Science Education Institute (DOST-SEI).
In the Final Presentation of Projects and Awarding Ceremony held 28 March 2017 at the Henry Sy, Sr. Innovation Center, Miriam College, Philippine Science High School – Eastern Visasas Campus’ (PSHS EVC)“Water Rise Alert System”, Pitogo High School’s “Project I.R.I.S. or Intercepting Relayed Imaging System”, and Limay National High School’s “Project Maxima: Hydropower Generator” emerged on top of nine other technologies from same number of team-finalists.
Limay National High School’s Jonel Mark Carandang, Aureen Kyle I. Mandap and Kenneth Legaspi developed their hydropower generator device, Maxima, to provide their school an extra clean source of energy to help reduce its electrical bill.
Their device is equipped with liquid level, temperature, current, and water flow sensors, steel foundations, batteries, 500W electric inverter/converter, improvised rotary generator, and many others. The actual project cost was only Php 6,398.00.
Pitogo High School’s Daveren John Cordero, Steven Da-anton, and Jose Gabrielle Rivera developed an automatic surveillance system dubbed IRIS, which can detect cars that step encroach the pedestrian lane when the traffic light turns red, helping authorities track the frequency of this violation every day and act accordingly. The trio conducted software and hardware developments for IRIS, which only cost them Php 7,582.
Meanwhile, Kent Marc Kobe Bismark, Johan Castillejos, and John Ejie Relente of PSHS-EVC made use of their experience during Typhoon Yolanda to develop their Water Rise Alert System. It is a device powered with a water level sensor, a radio frequency transmission unit, alarms, a raindrop detector, some lights for danger signaling, and solar panels, that measures water levels in prone areas and transmit data to a control center to give warnings to residents.
The three projects impressed the judges composed of Professors from the University of the Philippines Diliman’s Electrical and Electronics Engineering Institute, and Emerson Philippines, a major sponsor in the project.
SEI Director Dr. Josette Biyo congratulated the winners as well as the finalists for their impressive ideas and creations.
“The quality of projects we collected in this activity is very promising. Young students like you certainly have great ideas and it’s exciting to look forward to our future, when you have more resources and competencies to turn your ideas into great technologies, products, or big-time programs,” she said.
The imake.wemake project, which was launched in 2016, sought to unleash the creativity of students in Grades 10 and 11 through the process of innovation. Teams were asked to pitch project proposals about an invention or a technological solution to any problems they encounter in their respective communities such as traffic, garbage, flooding, and the like. Such technologies should be powered by a smart microprocessor called Intel Galileo Board II, funded by Emerson Philippines.
A total of 19 proposals were screened of which 13 moved on to the Project Pitch phase held in December last year. All 13 schools received a training kit and units of Intel Galileo boards. After two months of developing, testing, and validating their technologies, nine finalists presented their projects in the last phase.
“We hope that this is a first of many as there is surely no shortage of ideas from our young kids. This is an important platform for us to urge them to innovate,” Biyo remarked. (30)