Students intelligence

The would-be engineers from the Engineering Department at the Chinese University did not hesitate to transform their innovative ideas into reality. Their inventions, displayed at the "Systems Engineered City" exhibition in New Town Plaza, were useful and attractive. "Just insert $4 and the machine will make egg balls automatically. "It takes only 3 minutes to make these freshly-made egg balls," said Year 3 engineering student Annie Hui Sze Wun while demonstrating the machine. She said the project was created by six students who love eating egg balls. They hope that people can enjoy fresh and hygienic egg balls wherever and whenever they like. Though appre-ciating the idea of hygienic egg balls, most visitors were not satisfied with the machine.

The egg ball vending machine-fresh egg balls whenever you like.

Miss Hui said, "Since it is only a student project, the budget is very limited.

"We can only make use of simple compartments. It is just a basic model that needs refining. In fact, it can easily be improved with money."

Another invention that may replace the hawkers on the street is the fish ball vending machine. It provides customers with freshly cooked fish balls.

Unlike those sold in food stalls, the fish balls made by this machine are not boiled in the sauce too long. Thus, their taste is retained.

A student inventor from the team of nine, Mr. William Lau Wai Yip, said, "In order to keep the fish balls fresh, the unboiled ones are put into a refrigerator.

"When cooking begins, fish balls are arranged into rows of five to six. "They then fall, row by row, into metal baskets hung on a rolling wheel. "As the wheel rotates, they are put into boiling water." Once money is inserted, the row boiled for the longest period will be sent to another part of the machine, where a stick is pushed through the balls.

One team designed this fish ball vending machine.

Comments were mixed. Some visitors said the machine was not automatic enough because someone was needed to inspect the quality of the fish balls.

Another popular student project was the modified karaoke information retrieval system.

Mr. Kenny Leung Yiu, leader of a team of 13 that invented the system, said, "Our invention is specially designed to improve the original clumsy system.

"The present system that most karaoke lounges are using is one of single medium. The keyboard or remote control is its only control.

"Our new system is of multi-media. Apart from using the remote control, two other media, sound and writings, can be used as well."

With this new technology, users can retrieve the songs just by saying their names. Or they can say the name of the singer so that all of the singer's songs will appear on the screen for the users to choose.

Besides, they may use a writing board, too. Users can put down either the song titles, singer names or even part of the lyrics of the songs on the board to retrieve them..

At present, disc jockeys are needed in karaoke lounges to insert laser discs into the machines. But with this invention, the whole process is automatic.

Most visitors interviewed were fond of this invention. Still, some suspected the practicality of the sound control function since karaoke lounges were so noisy.

Apart from the inventions introduced above, many other students' projects were shown in the exhibition. They were the Chinese font translation system, supermarket simulation system, Chinese information retrieval system and Chinese query language system, just to name a few. They showed that students' projects can be great fun, too.