許伯銘

香港中文大學物理系Pak-Ming HUI

Department of Physics, The Chinese University Of Hong Kong

Our Winning Teams Last year:

•Audio systems on buses

•Intelligent Security robots

•The golden mean

Audio system on buses

•A well-defined practical problem, relevant to daily experience

•Showed strong evidence for:

•Good report/ presentation (photo showing process and progress during investigation)

•An enjoyable learning process

•Step-by-step improvement as project proceeds

•Trial-and-error approach/ revised designs

•Team work

•Students actually do the work

•Enter the competition as a report?

•More/ deeper explanation on principle?

•Demo to illustrate principle?

•A scaled-down demo or a full-sized demo kit?

•Other applications of the same idea?

•Show us that it actually works! “Seeing is believing”

Robots

•Hottest team in town!

•Seems to be a well-defined problem

•Strong Points:

•Winning nearly all competitions in 2003

•Relevant to daily experience

•Practical?

•Hardware, software, electronics, artistic designs, etc. (outside school curriculum)

•A product that works!

•Technically quite involved

•Team work

•Idea of integration

•A good mix of ‘experts’ in hardware and software

•Integrate different applications into new generation of robots

•A good idea of designing new products

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Examples:

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Good invention does not have to be complicated!

(Preliminary version)

Revised version

•Presentation/ report could be better

•What’s up next year? Robot again?

The Golden Mean

•A scholarly piece of work

•A refreshing topic (not so many projects on mathematics)

•A lot of information

•Digested and presented in an orderly way

•We take reading and good review on a topic seriously (key to serious research work)

•Good mix with examples of local flavour

•Well-prepared report and presentation

•Touched upon the topic here and there

•Can go deeper, with explanations on each topic at the level of your peer [e.g. music (perfect fifth has frequency ratio of 3:2), sunflower, etc. explain in more detail]

So, to WIN:

•Planning: Select good topic, time management, division of labour

•Review: What have been done by others? (books, websites, …)

•Set target: Idea on final product/ report (can’t revise product forever)

•Make good use of your teammates’ expertise

•Be a responsible teammate

•Have an exhibit that WORKS

•Proof-read your report

•Rehearse your presentation

And, most importantly, your Commitment:

You enter the competition by choice. So you should spend a reasonable amount of time on the project. You DON’T enter for other reasons than to •learn from the process, •to gain hands-on experience on investigative work, and •to get used to good working ethics