(Image from Acer Academy website)

During the Department of Science and Technology’s (DOST) launch of the Imake.WeMake competition in 2016, young Filipinos showcased their inventions that can help address some of the country’s societal problems.

This year, DOST partnered with local ICT company Acer Philippines to host the competition’s sophomore run using its Internet-of-Things toolkit, the Acer CloudProfessor.

“Equipped with the CloudProfessor, young Filipinos can now easily apply programming in their innovative solutions,” said Manuel Wong, managing director of Acer Philippines. “Coding can be a challenge for young innovators that all it takes is one wrong character for your code not to run. Acer CloudProfessor helps students with the wide selection of built-in codes that can easily be adapted in their creation.”

The Acer CloudProfessor toolkit combines hardware, software, and the cloud to make coding easy to learn and apply. Using any mobile device, users can easily start coding with JavaScript, LiveCode, or Google’s Blockly anywhere by just using the CloudProfessor app. The straightforward interface and the toolkit’s user-friendliness add to the ease of use making coding simple to understand and effortless to execute. Each pack contains the CloudProfessor unit with eight application packages for the students to try out with the provided sample code, so they can experiment with hardware and mix and match the applications based on their preference.

“We devised CloudProfessor to be the tool that can make coding easy and fun,” said Wong. “Eventually, this will enable more and more Filipino students to become adept in coding, which is a necessary skill to thrive and excel in a tech-savvy work environment.”

In last year’s competition, student participants from high schools in Bataan, Makati, and Leyte, emerged as the top teams, for developing a power generator to reduce energy consumption in schools, a traffic surveillance system to detect vehicles’ distance from pedestrian lanes, and water level sensors to detect rising flood waters.

A team from Pitogo High School- Makati developed “Project IRIS” or an Intercepting Relayed Imaging System which is an automatic surveillance system that can detect cars that overshoots within the pedestrian lane. Bataan’s representatives from Limay National High School developed “Project Maxima: Hydropower Generator,” which can provide their school with an extra clean source of energy. Lastly, inspired by learnings from super-typhoon Yolanda, Philippine Science High School-Eastern Visayas Campus made a Water Rise Alert System equipped with a water level sensor, a radio frequency transmission unit, alarms, a raindrop detector, lights for danger signaling, and solar panels for recharging.

“With last year’s remarkable entries, the bar is definitely set higher now with the inclusion of Acer’s CloudProfessor. Since coding will be supported by the all-in-one toolkit, we are expecting more impactful inventions to grab our attention,” said Dr. Josette Biyo, director of the DOST-Science Education Institute.

Teams of three students can submit their prototype proposals of inventions or solutions in food safety, education, health, security, and disaster mitigation using the CloudProfessor as the main platform. Qualifying teams will be given technical training and workshop on CloudProfessor to help in developing their prototypes. After training, the teams will present their final output and three of the most outstanding works will receive prizes and awards.