On August 24, the eight-member team of ZJUI undergraduates BAO Zichen, DONG Wenlan, LIU Zhuping, LI Jingshu, LIU Bowen, WANG Chenhao, CHANG Junyu, and SU Yipeng won a gold award from the 6th Zhejiang College Students’ ‘Internet Plus’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition. They are all from the class of 2022. Although the competition was only three days long, their efforts to perfect the smart green box project which helps them secure a gold award position have long been protracted. It is reported that a total of 207,908 college students from 128 colleges and universities across the province participated in the event, they put forward 28,528 projects and 148 of which won gold awards, and the gold award winning rate was only 0.52%.
The project proposed by the team focuses on a smart green box product, which aims to solve the pain points of single plants species of Dubai courtyard and high maintenance costs through the "green box" high-tech structure, assembled planting mode and smart irrigation system. They designed this product to reduce water consumption in the planting process while increasing the survival rate of plants, enriching the types of vegetation in arid areas, and reducing irrigation and maintenance costs. At the same time, they have also innovatively added intelligent irrigation services to the products, thus providing users with a simple and fun planting experience. This project has extensive market space in arid regions such as Dubai and the "One Belt One Road" countries. At present, the project team has obtained a number of patents, has reached a cooperation agreement with related parties in Dubai, and has established a model project in Dubai. At the same time, the team is in the process of actively promoting the Expo exhibition.
Model Project in Dubai
The eight members of the team come from civil and environmental engineering, mechanical engineering, computer engineering, electrical engineering respectively. The team leader and the founder of this project, BAO Zichen, is responsible for team management, DONG Wenlan is responsible for product development and improvement, LIU Zhuping charges the marketing design part, LIU Bowen focus on the publicity, and LI Jingshu, WANG Chenhao, CHANG Junyu and SU Yipeng developed intelligent system design.
When it comes to why choosing such a project, team leader BAO Zichen said that in addition to a coincidence, it also benefits from ZJUI’s cross-disciplinary education. ZJUI provide cross-disciplinary teamwork experience, a broad international perspective, and also help students to develop the ability of learning independently. Students of ZJUI are often concerned about global engineering challenges and are also interested in solving some common problems that troubled the international community. This kind of cross-disciplinary cooperation project is nothing new to ZJUI students. Everyone likes this kind of teamwork, which enable students to optimize the project by using each one’s professional expertise, and at the same time, to explore and learn independently to solve the problem.
Professional courses such as engineering economics, mechanics-related courses, electronics-related courses, and computer programming-related courses provided by ZJUI play a very important role in project design and development. "Under ZJUI’s unique international innovation training model, students’ logical thinking ability, presentation ability, teamwork ability, independent exploration and research ability have all been improved in their daily study. These abilities helped a lot during the competition and enable us to deal with challenges more calmly.” Bao Zichen said.
"I would also like to thank our four instructors, Prof. K.C TING, Prof.LI Binbin, Prof.LI Chushan and Prof.Weeliat Ong for their careful guidance on business model design, intelligent irrigation system development and presentation materials preparation." The success of the team also benefited from the efforts of the four instructors of ZJUI. As one of the instructors, Professor K.C. TING, Vice Dean of the International Campus of Zhejiang University College and an internationally renowned agricultural engineering expert, mentioned that, the proposal is well-written, and shows the team’s clear understanding of the business, geographical market(s), plants’ role in urban landscape design, knowledge of horticulture, conservation of environmental resources (water in this case), and engineering methods for problem solving. The business plan is based on real case opportunities and presents a comparative advantage. “I have been very impressed by their diligence in thorough research, science-based analysis, and logical presentation. They have taken the work with high interest and very seriously. They have been approaching me with excellent ideas and documents. All I need to do has been to serve as a critical reviewer of their work and challenge them with some stretched ideas. They have always been very responsive to my suggestions and comments. I have actually learned quite a bit from their project. The team and the project are a good example of how our International Campus enables its members to learn and succeed globally.”, Prof. Ting said.
Another instructor, ZJUI Associate Professor Weeliat Ong also believes that the team's plans and ideas are relatively mature and useful. Especially in the current situation of global epidemic, this product can effectively reduce labor, and can also lower the threshold for planting vegetables, so that everyone can grow vegetables by themselves and reduce going out. In addition, the product is also suitable for indoor environments, in addition to producing food, it can also beautify the home.
As Prof.K.C. Ting said, the team and the project fully demonstrated the value of ZJUI's international innovation education model and the concept of " to learn and succeed globally " of the international campus. Students will continue to exercise their skills, pioneer and innovate in their study and life, continue to apply what they have learned to their lives, and continue to meet global engineering challenges as their responsibility.
