West Rand’s schools top at UJ-Unitronics
Pupils were challenged to solve real world problems using industrial equipment and components.
The Kings School West Rand was announced the overall winners of the UJ-Unitronics Weather Station Design Challenge at TechnoLab.
This is a second time in a row the school has won the challenge which was held at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) during the weekend.
The challenge included Hoërskool Florida and Deutsche Internationale Schule Johannesburg.
Pupils were challenged to solve real world problems using industrial equipment and components.
The weather station concept supports school STEM curriculum and focuses on safety, design, construction and operation.
Each project was required to incorporate the use of Unitronics Programmable Logic Controllers.
Excessive spending on the project was not permitted.
The UJ-Unitronics challenge exposes pupils to opportunities within the field of electrical engineering and how simple technological innovations can be used to measure real weather parameters, incorporate weather storage data, display data and computed parameters with time and geographical information.
Beyond mere development of the weather station, teams are required to present on data collected over a 14-day period.
Deutsche Internationale Schule Johannesburg impressed judges with their low cost model which utilised recycled material with the total expenditure amounting to R8.
The team won Most Innovative Award and the Best Construction Award while Hoërskool Florida won the awards for Most Data Captured and Best Functionality.
Head of School: Electrical Engineering, Prof Johan Meyer was impressed with thee participants and congratulated them on a job well done.
The 2015 panel of judges included South African Institute of Electrical Engineers President, Andrè Hoffman; School of Electrical Engineering associate professor, Prof Yanxia Sun and postgraduate student, Anthony Gaskell from the Carl and Emily Fuchs Institute of Microelectronics at University of Pretoria.
Participating teams were issued with Citek Digital Multimeters sponsored by Coral-I Solutions, and the overall winners received an AfrikaBot starter kit to compete in the 2016 AfrikaBot challenge.
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