No Challenge, No Youth "Challenge Cup" stimulates the innovative power of youth

【Produced by Deep Hitomi Studio】

Written by: Zhang Galen, reporter of this newspaper

Planner: Liu Li

University study cannot just go from knowledge to knowledge, from textbook to textbook. Letting students truly feel the world is an important part of university education. Through the preparation for the "Challenge Cup", they gained a deep understanding of practical problems and internalized knowledge into competence. After a few years, technology is iterating, and students' understanding of things is deepening - this is growth.

"Magnetism, one of the four fundamental forces of the universe. Our micro-nano power, dedicated to driving magnetic substances through magnetic fields, and the superpower of freely controlling metals will no longer be a science fiction scene. Our magnetron capsule robot can achieve precise movement, ensuring that it can reach any position in the stomach and shoot at any angle. We have an advantage over similar products around the world. ”

This is the beginning of the copywriting written by Zhao Jiawei's team for the entrepreneurial project. Be preemptive, but also easy to understand.

PPT, they changed version after edition. Expression, they polished over and over again.

In the 13th "Challenge Cup" China College Student Entrepreneurship Plan Competition, Zhao Jiawei's project "Medcreate Maglev Capsule Robot: A Revolutionary in the Field of Gastrointestinal Testing" won the gold award.

This is an important honor and the award certificate is placed in the company's display case.

Zhao Jiawei comes from the School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation of Beihang University and has chosen to study for master's and doctoral studies. His other role is the technical director of Beijing Micro-Nano Power Technology Co., Ltd. Taking the company as a platform, Zhao Jiawei opened his own new research direction - photoelectric tweezers.

He enjoys the feeling of being at the cutting edge, even if it feels "painful", but this is the path that innovators must take.

After all, no challenge, no youth.

More than just the classroom to achieve new breakthroughs

Winning the gold medal in the "Challenge Cup" is not easy.

This year, 32,3011,142 students from 4,33 schools in <> provinces, Hong Kong and Macao submitted more than <>,<> innovation and entrepreneurship projects.

After the school-level preliminary round, provincial semi-final, national final preliminary evaluation, national final final evaluation and other links, a total of 154 gold award projects, 309 silver award projects and 1079 bronze award projects were selected.

Gold award projects, one in a thousand.

The "Challenge Cup" has now become a science and technology innovation event for college students across the country, and it is a golden signboard in the field of youth innovation and entrepreneurship, and the professionalism and authority of the competition have been widely recognized by universities.

However, winning the award is like a "by-product" for this group of teachers and students, a kind of praise for research.

In 2018, Zhao Jiawei, a first-year undergraduate, joined the research group of Professor Feng Lin of the School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation of Beihang University. He likes Feng Lin's research direction - micro-nano robots, cutting-edge, interesting, and "can solve pain points".

Four years have passed, and Zhao Jiawei has stayed in the research group and has become the main force.

In the laboratory, Zhao Jiawei can talk about performance and parameters; But in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship, the judges are concerned with the relationship between technology and users. They ask about the user's experience and feelings, and about the practical difficulties of market expansion.

"At the beginning, the questions asked by the judges really didn't think about it, and the atmosphere was very awkward." Zhao Jiawei said.

The Challenge Cup is not the first entrepreneurship competition the team has competed in. Generally speaking, to win gold and silver in such national competitions, project members often have experienced multiple provincial and municipal competitions.

The competition is honing the team, and the micro-nano robots and micro-nano operation scientific research projects led by Feng Lin are also becoming more and more mature. In March last year, Micro-Nano Power Company was officially registered.

This is an era when hard technology can be favored. Investors have money in their hands and look for innovations that excite them. The arena of the innovation and entrepreneurship competition for college students is also their "hunting ground". Investors with a keen sense of smell will find these potential projects and push them forward.

For Zhao Jiawei, an important value of entrepreneurship is to promote his own scientific research and learning. Feng Lin commented that he is one of the few undergraduates who can independently undertake scientific research tasks.

In the capsule gastroscopy robot project, Zhao Jiawei is responsible for making the robot body.

For this capsule to be able to enter the human gastrointestinal tract by swallowing, it must be small enough, but it must be able to achieve high-definition shooting and high-speed image transmission. Therefore, many circuit components are integrated on a mini circuit board.

"I often look at a very small circuit board with a microscope on it and stare at the microscope to do soldering. After an afternoon, a board may not be welded well. Zhao Jiawei recalled, "Sometimes welding for a day or two, after a test, this board can not be used, welding is wrong." ”

The main teaching principle in the class, even if there is a hands-on practical link, students will not be given such a small circuit board, "a resistor may be larger than our entire board". In the laboratory, Zhao Jiawei is proficient in circuit design and understands that scientific research must be done with data.

Now, Zhao Jiawei is involved in Feng's photoelectric tweezer project, a technology that can quickly capture the most desired one from thousands of cells. He is mainly responsible for the processing and manufacturing of photoelectric tweezer microoperating system and its supporting chips. "It requires a theoretical foundation, and I learned from scratch, gnawed at the literature, and flipped through a lot of materials. Chip making is another process, and the 'know how' in it is a summary of thousands of hands-on experiences, and it is difficult to understand the differences in details without doing it yourself, and many things have to be repeatedly debugged. This process is painful. ”

However, turning laboratory results into commercial products and challenging unattainable R&D goals also makes young people's blood boil. "I especially want to make this kind of core technology breakthrough." Zhao Jiawei said.

Get out of the ivory tower and find the real problem

"We went to the rural northwest to do research and found that even with burning coal, the house was very cold. Some elderly people are distressed about money, and as long as their children are not at home, they would rather be frozen and wrapped in large cotton jackets than burn coal. Wang Yifei, a 2019 undergraduate student at the School of Information and Electronics at Beijing Institute of Technology, said.

This is a real problem that college students find in practice. Wang Yifei participated in the "Rural Revitalization and Agricultural and Rural Modernization" track of the "Challenge Cup" with the solution and won the gold award.

The students have been to Luliang in Shanxi, Pingliang in Gansu and Wuzhong in Ningxia, and have truly felt the pain points of rural heating - high coal prices and high environmental pollution. In Hubao Village, Fangshan County, Shanxi Province, annual heating costs can account for 30% of farmers' annual income. The ecological environment in Northwest China is fragile, but the sunshine is sufficient, and efficient light and heat conversion is the best choice for heating.

If the efficiency of solar heating can be improved, heating costs can be greatly reduced, allowing warmth to enter more homes.

Wang Yifei joined the science and technology innovation project "Construction of Solar Heating Management Platform Based on Internet of Things" in his sophomore year, and was committed to developing a new solar intelligent cloud control system.

The new intelligent heat storage technology innovatively proposed by the team has the technical advantages of night emptying and intelligent water supply during the day, which greatly reduces heating costs. The introduction of Internet of Things technology also solves the shortcomings of traditional solar hot water heating equipment such as short heating time, weak temperature control performance and poor user experience.

From 2019 to 2023, every holiday, the team will be on site to research, develop, install and debug solar energy equipment, and provide technical services for the elderly.

Although their original intention was to solve the problem of rural heating, as the project deepened, they received consultations from all walks of life - some raised scorpions, raised yellow eels, and some did air conditioning cleaning... They all need low-cost heat sources.

The competition allows students to immerse themselves in technology and touch the pulse of rural areas they are not familiar with.

In order to prepare for the competition and start a business, Wang Yifei and his partners also have to learn equity and financial knowledge, know how money is earned and how it is spent. Everyone teams up across faculties to let the wisdom of different disciplines collide together. They changed from the perspective of students to the perspective of entrepreneurs, concerned about how to implement the results after they are developed, and care about the economy. "It's better to really solve an engineering problem than to lie on my stomach and learn it myself." Wang Yifei said.

In the broad social practice, young people should discover problems and solve them.

Qin Kangxiang, project leader of the gold award team of the 12th "Challenge Cup" China College Student Entrepreneurship Plan Competition, is from the College of Oceanography of Ningbo University, majoring in aquaculture. His business was to raise sea crabs on the saline inland land.

It sounds contradictory, but this is what Qin Kangxiang has been doing since he was an undergraduate. He himself said that sea crabs are raised on land, just like penguins running to the equator.

He joined the sea crab low-salt research group, and followed his senior brothers and sisters to start eating and living with sea crabs - they wanted to domesticate sea crab species suitable for saline-alkali land.

After 270 days of round-the-clock trials and the initial test of four green crab species, they screened out the most suitable parents in nearly 4,12 batches of sea crab samples, developed a high-efficiency crab seed desalination technology, and reduced the lower limit of salinity of sea crab from 2‰ to 5‰. They then increased the survival rate of the sea crabs from less than 95 percent to <> percent under laboratory conditions.

Qin Kangxiang brought the developed sea crabs back to his hometown Henan to complete the breeding and promotion. In order to solve the doubts of the villagers, the team traveled back and forth between Ningbo and Henan again and again, and gave the desalinated crab seedlings cultivated in the laboratory to the villagers for free, and taught the villagers the breeding techniques learned from the laboratory and various farms in Ningbo. Seeing that the bred saline-alkali sea crabs are large and good, more and more people are taking the first step in farming.

According to Qin Kangxiang's statistics, the team has helped more than 270 poor households in saline-alkali land, benefiting 6 villages in 29 counties, helping farmers increase their comprehensive income per mu by more than 1,5 yuan, and a cumulative increase of 7000 million yuan. The real income of the villagers is the best encouragement.

"As a farmer, there is nothing more proud than being able to use what you have learned to benefit the land that feeds me!" Qin Kangxiang is willing to become a model to inspire those college students who want to return to their hometown to start a business like him, "Go, go and make the youth contribution of college students in the new era"!

Race for education Create for growth

Comparing a result is not the purpose of the Challenge Cup. In recent years, in response to the deepening reform requirements of the central committee of the standard group, the "Challenge Cup" competition has continued to deepen the reform of the concept of running the competition and the setting of the competition, realizing the transformation from "competition-oriented" to "education-oriented" and from "result-oriented" to "process-oriented".

For example, this year's "Challenge Cup" Chinese College Student Entrepreneurship Plan Competition reduces the proportion of scoring the commercial value of the project, and pays more attention to the awareness, ability and level of students to understand the current social situation, pay attention to social livelihood, and solve social problems.

To let students compete, Feng's original intention was simple - to train them. "I want to train undergraduates and get them interested in research." As for winning the award, it was not within Feng Lin's preset.

The young mentor didn't want his students to become stereotypical science and engineering students — not good at words, just tinkering with themselves in the lab.

He needs them to get out.

Lin Feng received his master's and doctoral degrees in Japan. At that time, Japanese mentors required them to attend top international conferences in the field of robotics every year, and on average went abroad to give presentations in one or two months. After bringing the students himself, Feng Lin also required them to report with PPT every two weeks. "Let them keep talking, keep talking, practice until they report without stage fright, and express logic clearly."

In Feng Lin's view, at this stage of the development of the discipline, the breakthrough point often appears in the intersection. To shine at the cross-cutting level, you must see the world, collaborate and communicate, and listen to the needs of all parties. "I often tell students that you can't do it behind closed doors. You can't think how good your skills are, and don't entertain yourself. ”

Participating in the entrepreneurship competition is a process for students to get "knocked". A group of science and engineering students, in the round of "fighting" with the judges, gradually shifted from technical thinking to product thinking.

Feng Lin saw that the students were becoming more and more "stable", had seen big scenes, and could support big tasks, resist pressure, and carry things. Even if they do not take the road of entrepreneurship in the future, this is also a very important ability and quality for scientific research alone.

Similarly, whether the company can make money is not the primary consideration of Wang Yifei's project instructor.

"As teachers, we hope that they can solve some major problems for the country and society, which is also the mission of their generation of young people." Cui Wei, Secretary of the Party Committee of the School of Information and Electronics of Beijing Institute of Technology, sighed.

After being a teacher for so many years, Cui Wei knows very well that university learning cannot only go from knowledge to knowledge, from textbook to textbook. Students who can enter the North Institute of Technology will not be bad at the level of knowledge, but what they have to make up for is the "practical" class. Competitions like the Challenge Cup give students a chance to rethink. "It's okay if the idea is immature, at least they can stop and think about it."

The "Challenge Cup" is a big stage, from the Central Committee of the Youth League to other organizers such as the China Association for Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education, from schools to colleges, have given enough attention and support. Polytechnic universities also have mandatory requirements for students' practical ability. Cui Wei believes that letting students truly feel the world is an important part of college education. "Being in the ivory tower for a long time, it is easy to be ignorant of society. Through the preparation for the 'Challenge Cup', they have gained a deep understanding of practical problems and internalized knowledge into competence. Cui Wei saw that after a few years, technology was iterating, and students' understanding of things was also deepening - this is growth. (Science and Technology Daily)