Competition spurs young designers

From filling spare time to being a finalist in a national electrotechnology competition, Cheng-Yueh Liu's Liu Dashboard is taking him places.

The John McGlashan College pupil has been interested in design technology since he was a 5-year-old, and designing and creating software is now one of his hobbies.

His most recent invention allowed him to fill a want - a Windows sidebar, like those available with Windows Vista. Because he did not have the Vista operating system, he decided to create his own program which would be compatible with all systems.

The application allowed the user to manage all their multimedia needs, he said.

"It was challenging trying to solve all the technical difficulties by myself, but learning new concepts, problem solving and logical reasoning skills was great," he said.

Cheng-Yueh entered the application in the New Zealand Bright Sparks Competition and was announced as a finalist last week.

Having only discovered the Bright Sparks programme a couple of months ago, he was still familiarising himself with how it worked, but intended to become more involved with the programme's 2300 other members.

Because his dream job was not as a software developer, but as a design engineer, Cheng-Yueh intended to enrol at the University of Canterbury's College of Engineering when he finished school, and keep programming as a side interest.

Dunedin's other Bright Spark finalist is Taieri College pupil Ben Mulholland. He again made the finals of the competition, this time with his Need 4 Speed laser timing device.

The invention also won top place at the Aurora Otago Science and Technology Fair this year.

However, Ben did not think the timer would go as far as his iPod Super Dock, which won the Bright Sparks competition last year and went on to win the engineering category at the International Science and Technology Fair in Taiwan.

Compared to the dock, the laser was not as technologically complicated, but with more development, it had the potential to be marketable, he said.

Ben was already on to his next big invention, though he remained tight-lipped, other than saying "touch screen".

He believed some "quite impressive" projects had made the finals of the Bright Sparks Competition. One in particular was a device to improve posture by monitoring vertebrae via a skin-tight cloth layer.

"It's got a lot of potential," he said.

• To see other entries in the Bright Sparks Competition, and vote for your favourite, visit www.brightsparksawards.org.nz