Students display their inventions at CSITF

TWENTY-THREE innovative works by local teenagers are on display at the seventh China (Shanghai) International Technology Fair.

The inventions range from installations for garbage sorting, device to alert students when their posture is wrong, intelligent guide rod for the visually impaired people and another that sets off alarm to warn pedestrians when large vehicles make a right turn.

All the inventions were created by the students to handle real problems in life and incubated last year at the Shanghai Youth Model Innovation and Entrepreneurship Project run by the Shanghai Educational Center of Science and Art. They were among the winners from more than 100 programs.

Shanghai Shangde Experimental School has three projects exhibited at the grand fair. Among them is the large vehicle right-turn safety reminder developed by eighth-grade student Wang Luobin.

“I decided to work on it as large vehicles have been known to cause deadly accidents when making right turns,” he said. “I interviewed drivers and found that the cameras and image system in the driver’s cabin are very expensive. So I made this system to warn pedestrians.”

Xie Xiaoyun, a fifth-grader from Baoshan, teamed up with three other students to develop a set of installations to help people learn about waste sorting.

“We designed the system to make garbage sorting like a game and interesting for children,” said Xie. “Even kindergarten students can play it.”

They are the third batch of students’ inventions to be displayed at the annual fair. Many of them have won patents or are under assessment for patent approval.

Ami Dror, CEO of LeapLearner, a Shanghai-based education technology company that teaches children to code, said children should start innovating as early as possible. The program assists children in turning their ideas into reality.