The HKUST Igniters Pilot Study

Project Title

The HKUST Igniters Pilot Study

Project Leader

Prof Yu-Hsing Wang

School / Dept

SENG / CIVL

Project Duration

July 2012 - June 2013

Project Description

This project developed a new course called “The HKUST Igniters”, which promoted the Incubation of Greatness, Networking (channels), Innovations, Technology and Entrepreneurship (IGNITE). The teaching approach of the new course targeted on the imagination and hands-on experience of the students themselves to achieve the entrepreneurial spin-off of their inventions (or software package) in the end. The whole course set in the dimension of meta-cognitive knowledge with the execution along the way a blend of the procedural knowledge.

Project Outcome

The major outcomes of this project are:

1. the acquiring of the skill to communicate ideas with teammates and work with them;
2. the acquiring of the ability to proactively seek for the needed knowledge to complete the tasks;
3. the ability to design a final prototype that solves an important problem, and finally if possible; and
4. acquire the necessary knowledge and investment to start up a company. We achieve the first three but fall short of the fourth.

The major deliverables are:

1. completion of two different prototypes of Smart Soil Particles (SSP, originally named GeoMEMS), one for massive field deployment and another one for intensive on-site data collection;
2. successful on-site installation of the latter SSP  and a month into it the sensor captured a minute earthquake nearby, and finally
3. successfully enter the HKUST 2013 One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition and had been selected as one of the 12 finalists.

Status

Completed

Project Documents
(Only accessible by HKUST users)

• Project Plan
• Final Report
• Project-end Review by Project Leader

Adaptation

Full Project