SSEF 2009

Well, so this year’s Singapore Science and Engineering Fair (SSEF) concluded today.

Last year, I returned home disappointed, with all my efforts producing a Silver. Everybody was saying that it’s a highly respectable prize already, placing my project within the top 15% of the fair. And that’s also factoring that only 60% of all submitted projects made it to the fair.

Maybe I expected too much, but I guess I couldn’t expect anything less when the other team under the same mentor won Gold for two years, and went on to win an ISEF Gold as well.

Perhaps, also, I was more disappointed with the fact that I only had one attempt at SSEF (being JC2) and I failed.

And I also blame two of my judges who were absent. My project had to judged by replacements at the very last minute.

…

So this year I returned to SSEF 2009, as an organiser.

Ryan and I tried something innovative. At about 2.45pm, we managed to get a chat system working on a laptop. Whereby, it’s simply a message board which updates every 10 seconds. People can send in a message by SMSing to a number, and the message would be instantly displayed. The laptop’s screen was projected onto a larger screen, and everyone could read it of course.

Pretty neat idea.

Within 5 minutes, it was an instant hit among all the bored SSEF participants.

The NJC students had this really bright idea of working together to spam the board with the same message. And they did. 10 minutes and 68 messages later, they successfully sent in enough messages to jam the system and put it out permanently.

THANKS NJC SSEF PARTICIPANTS.

Still, it was a first and something absolutely worth implementing in future SSEFs.

…

About the results.

14 projects won Gold. And that’s all I concerned myself with.

NJC and NUSHS were outperforming everyone else. NJC picked up 6 of the 14, while NUSHS is about there too.

Next year is the fair’s 10th anniversary. It’s supposedly going to bigger and special. We’ll see.