About
PowerTech is an international competition for young design engineers, held by National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei.
The competition has been held annually since 1999. The main goal of the PowerTech competition is to develop children's scientific and technical creativity. According to the rules of the competition, teams of 3-4 people assemble three electromechanical models from identical sets of parts, distributed to participants before the start of the competition, within three hours. The electromechanical part of the models must ensure its movement in one of the following ways - by means of four supports, multiple supports, oscillation, rotating wheels or crawling. The solution of these problems is intended to help schoolchildren understand the mechanics of structures and design a working robotic mechanism.
Over the 22 years of the competition’s existence, high-performance smartphones and microscopic robots have entered our lives, artificial intelligence systems and “smart homes” have appeared, and all the space free from objects has been taken over by Wi-Fi and 4G (and in some places, even 5G). Meanwhile, the contestants still have to arm themselves with jigsaws and hacksaws, pliers and hand drills, screwdrivers and glue to solve the tasks set before them. But most importantly, they have to think, create, build and compete with each other using models created with their own hands. Moreover, the requirements for these models are such that the simplest task, it would seem, to move in a straight line using the prescribed law of motion, requires more knowledge than the school curriculum provides. After all, it is one thing to solve a problem in a textbook, and quite another to create a “living” technical object.
Traditionally, teams from Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, India take part in the competition, and since 2018, teams from Russia have joined them.
Participation in the Young Design Engineers Competition is an excellent chance for young inventors to reveal their abilities in the field of scientific and technical creativity, to demonstrate that a technical solution does not necessarily have to be complex to be important, new and interesting.