Welcome back to the 2nd SPH Applied Science Academy (ASA) Exhibition. Over the last three years since the 1st ASA exhibition in 2019, there are more than 30 projects that have been explored and researched. It has certainly been a challenge for most of our students and mentors over the last three years in performing research. Like everyone else, students and mentors are forced to adapt to non-ideal teaching-learning situations and come up with solutions to achieve our goals. It is during these challenging times, I witness true grit and passion of the students and mentors. And I am very excited to share their success stories with you through their research works in this exhibition portfolio.
For those unfamiliar with the program, the Applied Science Academy is a research-based learning afterschool program for grade 10-12 students where they work with mentors from universities and research centers in their field of interest such as, renewable energy, biotechnology, computer science, food science and more. Through the program we hope students may deepen their passion, broaden their skillsets, become mature learners, while building their scientific portfolio for their college career. We are here to help nurture the next generation of scientists and engineers that cares about the environment and improving livelihood by applying their scientific and engineering skills to solve the world’s problems in the future.
This year, we are privileged to share the work of 22 of our current students with a combined total of 27 research projects. We also welcome new mentors in the past couple of years with experience in fields of renewable energy, remote sensing and bioinformatics, enhancing the diversity of the research projects in the ASA. Some of these works are nearing their completion and they are being prepared for scientific publications. One manuscript has been prepared as pre-prints, with several more coming next. Besides scientific discovery, several students have also managed to reach an important milestone in their project by demonstrating the proof-of-concept of their app and systems.
The exhibition will showcase highly original research works for example, the study of sea surface temperature and coastline evolution using remote sensing images around the Java islands. Remote sensing is one of the important fields of study in Geospatial Sciences that allow us to track and analyze the global environmental conditions through satellite images and datasets. Other students explored new renewable energy harvesting concepts such as the mechanical wave energy harvester that is envisioned to be deployable in ships, cars, bridges, and others. Several students developed Apps to help improve the mental health of students and to provide navigation assistance to the visually impaired persons. In biotechnology and food science, students worked on development of alternative leather from bacterial cellulose, edible plastics based on Nata de Coco and explored the development of new biopolymer blends derived from crab shell waste and algae. In robotics and electronics, several students worked on prototyping robotic vehicles, vision diagnostic tools and organic electronic devices. There are many other exciting topics to be presented in the exhibition.
Please join us and celebration the fruit of the hard work and commitment from our students and mentors over the last few years. Looking forward to seeing you in the Applied Science Academy Exhibition 2022.