Students in the European "green IT" finals
A student team that attended a course in IT Design in Kista is now in the European finals in Freescale FTF Design Challenge as one of five. This is a challenge for the best idea in Green IT – or energy-efficient embedded system. This is a competition open for companies as well as academia.
Three students came third in the European final of Freeescale FTF Design Challenge.
The team consisted of three exchange students at KTH EES - Chenghan Li (team leader) and Hua Jiang from China and Pelie Woo from Malaysia. They are course classmates at Nanyang Technological University. Their participation in the Freescale Challenge was done as part of a course in IT Design in Kista.
Two team members have already left Sweden, so we met up with the team-leader Chenghan Li to hear more. Their proposal is based on the idea to regain energy that is used when braking a car.
"What we have done is theoretical model for this, Chenghan Li explains. But now we need help to develop this model in “practice”. I am only a second year student, and I need to learn so much more."
Chenghan explains that they found the task very difficult at first. But when they came up with this idea it was easier. And he is very satisfied with their efforts.
"But I never expected to be selected for the European finals. Chenghan says. It feels so good."
Chenghan has spent a term at KTH as an exchange student, and he is going back shortly. He still has two years to finish his Bachelor in engineering, and he finds it difficult to have ideas for the distant future – other than the dream to be an engineer. But for the near future he is more precise.
"I want to try to get our university (Nanyang Technological University in Singapore) to help us to develop our idea before the finals in October, Chenghan underlines. And I know that the other two are going to do the same."
The three students will get back together in Singapore to invest some time with the team to further develop our idea by doing more research on it. Pellie Woo is already back home, but he makes his comments via e-mail.
"I always wanted to do something more practical that could be applied to our daily life instead of just learning theoretical stuff for exams. And I feel that my stint in KTH, Stockholm had given me many chances to do so. For me, I hope to return to Sweden one day in future to do my internship or start my career."
Behind the curtains
Professor Carl-Mikael Zetterling is responsible for the course and also the person that came up with the idea to let the students at his course participate with their IT Design solutions in the competition. The last three years Freescale has provided his course with hardware, prices and also with lectures. The purpose of the course is to let students compete with their IT design ideas. Earlier there has been a problem to get enough competition in the course because few students attended.
- This was the first year that Freescale had a competition open for all in Europe about the same time as our course, Carl-Mikael explains. And thanks to this we had a strong international competition where many teams came from industry. This challenge was not limited to students.
Only two teams from this year’s course participated, and Carl-Mikael Zetterling was uncertain how they would stand in international competition.
- I was so nice that one of the teams went to the European finals, but very sad that they didn’t have time to finish the project, Carl-Mikael Zetterling underlines. The theme for the challenge was “Green IT” – meaning energy-saving electronics. And they really had achieved that in their contribution.