As the 72nd International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) concluded, the projects of SHSID Grade 11 students Emma Li and Sophie Li “Test of Gross Motor Development: Evaluation through AI Image Processing and Wearable Sensors” finally won the Grand Award in the ISEF Global Finals (Biomedical Engineering Group), which is a historic breakthrough in ISEF participation.

The ISEF is the world’s largest and highest-level science competition for high-school students. The disciplines of the competition include natural and social sciences, providing a great platform for the world’s best young scientists and inventors to show their talents. It displays the latest scientific and technological achievements in this high-level competition in the field of youth science. This year, ISEF attracted about 7 million high-school students from all around the world to participate. After multiple selections at school, within provincial and state levels, and finally, national levels, about 1,800 students entered the global finals (the finalist rate is less than three out of ten thousand). Through all these fierce selections, Emma Li and Sophie Li eventually entered the global finals and competed with other young science fans across the world.

Starting from the long-distance running they are good at and the running postures they both have, the two students have devoted themselves to studying the research of related fields in domestic and foreign literature in the past year. Under the guidance of their instructors, they designed a complete set of devices to monitor young students’ postures and aimed to correct said postures through AI image recognition and data transmission from wearable sensors.

Emma and Sophie hope to introduce long-distance running to more students, and are committed to extending this technology to more schools for correcting students in running postures and other related fields.

In the 2021 ISEF Global Competition, their project entered the biomedical-engineering group, which was the fiercest competition and had the largest number of participants. Although offline competitions were not possible due to the pandemic, they made a lot of preparations before the competition and strived to show their achievements to expert judges and peers who love science around the world. They actively prepared exhibition boards, videos, photos, data records, etc., through activities geared towards defending an argument organized by the STEM guidance team, they made continuous modifications to better show their project’s characteristics and practice on answering the possible questions in detail raised by the judges. During the final defense, the two students confidently and comprehensively introduced the origin of the project, research goals, methodology, data analysis, and conclusions, showing the demeanor of SHSID students and their enthusiasm for scientific research.

SHSID provides students with platforms for their developments and opportunities to demonstrate their innovation, such as projects independently completed by students, the Project-Based Learning courses which help students to explore their interests, the Beyond courses that introduce frontier accomplishments by the invited professors, the STEM clubs organized by students, and innovative projects conducted in collaboration with universities and research institutions. Thus, enthusiasm of high-school students to participate in scientific research and the quality of scientific research projects continue to improve. SHSID always strives to make it possible for students to expand the boundaries of scientific research in addition to busy academic studies, and to pursue scientific research awards and explore their long-term scientific research interests and development ambitions, hope that more and more students have the opportunity to show their scientific creativity and research results on the highest stage.

Congratulations to the students for reaching the ISEF finals. We also wish that more students can keep their curiosity about the world, experience the joy of scientific research, lighten up their enthusiasm for learning, and embark on the road of searching for truth.

(Written by Emma Li, Lin Chen Pictures & Video by Emma Li, Sophie Li Supervised by Lin Chen, Qian Zuo)