Student innovation reaps rewards
Innovation, creativity and team work are strongly encouraged at Zhejiang University, with several student-focused initiatives recently in place promote these values through inquiry-based learning.
Initiatives such as the Mechanical Design Competition, a popular annual event overseen by the College of Mechanical Engineering, in which groups of students devise inventions to win prizes, and in the hope of being selected to represent ZJU at a national level, against other universities.
A total of 12 students’ inventions from ZJU, including medical devices and robot plumbers, have gone on to receive national invention patents. Five of those 12 have been awarded first prize in the all-China National Mechanical Competition.
Robot World Cup
The Robot World Cup is a renowned international competition in which Zhejiang Students have been successfully participating in since 2006.
RoboCup, as it’s known, exists to promote the study and development of robotics and artificial intelligence. In 2016 the competition was held in Leipzig, Germany, attracting over 15,000 participants from universities and research institutions the world over. Two teams from Zhejiang successfully fought off other competitors to win second place with a humanoid robot in one category, and third place in another.
Global Grand Challenges Summit
An ‘air faucet system’ developed by students at Zhejiang University won first prize in the 2015 Global Grand Challenges Summit. Although the faucet system looks like an ordinary tap, it uses a tenth of the water supply compared with a regular tap, making it a far more environmentally-friendly option.
