Eric Wang 王懷瑨

We spent a lot of time and effort in making our idea come true and were delighted to have the chance to represent our school and country to showcase our project in an international technology competition setting. Working on our cellphone disassembler, me and my team were able to learn valuable lessons even before we arrived in SHanghai. After all, the process of creating our project was a major aspect in this competition. We learned many new technical skills and concepts, such as image processing, internet communication protocols, 3D computer modeling and printing, circuit and board design, and controlling electro mechanical components. Furthermore, beyond the technical skills and concepts, we also learned other valuable “soft skill”. We learned how to communicate with one another and work as a team. Communication was vital because of the nature of robotic projects. Robotics include a vast array of different skills, such as mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer programming. It is almost impossible to work on every single aspect of the project, so we had to split it up. As we worked on separate aspects of the project, we eventually had to combine everything together and that required a lot of communication and we essentially had to each other about our respective parts so we could integrate everything smoothly.

Leon Chang 張立昂

During the weekend we spent at Shanghai, I learned and experienced many new things that could be pertinent to my future. When we first arrived at the Taoyuan airport, we were greeted by a nice lady who had our flight information ready for us. Since we did not prepare this information ourselves, we are very grateful of their help and assistance. The flight to Shanghai resulted in no issues and once we landed and passed the security, we were greeted by our very friendly host who was eager to accommodate and helped us.

The living quarters were very nice and also conveniently located near a bustling city shopping complex and also a subway station, which allowed us to explore the city during our off time and travel around. This was very nice and we took full advantage of it, going to the nearby shopping complexes and riding the subway to popular tourist destinations. Shanghai as a city was not at all as I expected. It is cleaner and more well organized than many other Chinese and Asian cities I’ve been to and is relatively similar to big cities in Taiwan. The people are nice enough and there are many shops. The stores and shops were actually more global than those in Taiwan; we were able to find many brands and stores that we could not find in Taiwan and I brought some of those foods home. For instance, there were many special chip flavours and restaurants that I have not seen before in Asia. Shanghai is also very high tech. Although Taiwan has bike sharing services like Ubike, Shanghai’s bike sharing ecosystem is much more advanced and well developed than ours. The bikes can even be parked anywhere and paying was done through the cell phone. Even stores embraced cellphone payments and I believe that these technologies should be adopted in other countries.

Josh Chen 陳宣鳴

At mid-December in the year before, the Robotics club was informed of the competition. We just finished the WRO, and the Shanghai science fair seemed like the perfect opportunity to continue to work on and improve the model we made for WRO. The original model was constructed using plastic lego pieces - with the exception of using pen metal clips for the grippers. The robot itself was a three axis gantry intended to extract specific components of the model phone; the component identification was done using image processing with the LabVIEW program. We wanted to automate the process of taking apart and recycling a used phone, and the plastic model was our first step in creating a proof of concept. Phone disassembly was chosen as our topic because we wanted to address the excess of electronic waste in the recent years. As planned obsolescence becomes more and more common, so does the amount of e-waste. In the face of this growing concern, we decided to attempt to provide a plausible solution.

In Shanghai, we were able to meet others in the competition and exchange ideas for future projects. One of them was working on a more efficient algorithm for google searches, one was using DNA as a medium of information storage, one was adding on to a mathematical theorem that no one really knew about until that moment. Overall it was your average congregation of Asian students mostly pushed to excel by their highly expectant parents.