Co-organised by the College of Science (CSCI) and the Office of the Provost and Deputy President, the CityUHK Science Patent Challenge 2025-26 came to a climax with the Final Pitch on 14 March. This is the very first time that a Macau team participated and reached the Final. Congratulations to the Heep Yunn School team for winning the Gold Award and Best Presentation Award! ESF Sha Tin College also took home another Gold Award.
To compete for the Gold Award, eight shortlisted teams, including the team from Macau’s Chan Sui Ki Perpetual Help College, presented their innovative ideas in person to the judges on stage.
The competition was intense and it was challenging for our five judges, Dr. Alfred Ng, Deputy Chairman of Federation of Hong Kong Industries (FHKI); Dr. CK Wong, Chairman and Founder of iASPEC Technologies (Holdings) Limited; Professor Xin Wang, Dean of CSCI; Professor Johnny Ho, CityUHK’s Associate Vice-President (Enterprise); and Professor Alex Wong, CityUHK’s Dean of Students, to decide on the awards.
Tasha Lam and Keith Tse, two Year 4 students from CityUHK’s flagship programme Global Research Enrichment and Technopreneurship (GREAT), were invited to serve as student judges and contributed to selecting the Best Presentation Award this year.
On behalf of the judging panel, Professor Wang welcomed the Macau team and described in his welcoming speech that by participating in this challenge, students have already “taken an important step toward becoming the innovators and leaders of tomorrow”. Professor Wang is impressed by the students’ strong ability to observe real needs in society and transform those insights into thoughtful, practical ideas. “Your work demonstrates that innovation has no age boundaries,” he added.
He reminded the student inventors that “every breakthrough is made possible by visionary young minds who dare to imagine new solutions and better approaches”. He encouraged them to explore new possibilities and develop the courage to pursue bold ideas.
The Gold Award-winning team from ESF Sha Tin College said they never imagined winning the championship as they were still struggling with the prototype during the presentation. “It is all about teamwork and we are grateful to the real firefighters we interviewed earlier. They provided valuable insights for us to improve our design,” the team concluded.
Another Gold Award-winning team, the Heep Yunn School expressed confidence in their invention’s potential, but they believe the key of winning is the diverse skills and knowledge of their team members, “our members are good at different fields like robotics and coding, therefore we can solve the technical problems on our own. And it was fun and rewarding in the self-learning process,” they reflected.
Congratulations to the below winning teams (in alphabetical order of the school names for the same award):
Gold Award: ESF Sha Tin College, Heep Yunn School
Silver Award: Queen’s College Old Boys’ Association Secondary School
Bronze Award: ESF Island School, St. Stephen’s Girls’ College, Yew Chung International School of Hong Kong
Merit Award: Chan Sui Ki Perpetual Help College, St. Francis’ Canossian College
Best Presentation Award: Heep Yunn School
To introduce the concept of intellectual property to secondary school students and to ignite their passion for science, students are encouraged to identify a problem and provide a creative and feasible way to solve it in the CityUHK Science Patent Challenge. Gold and Silver Award-winning teams will receive a full-fee sponsorship to apply for a Hong Kong short-term patent in consultation with a patent attorney appointed by the College of Science. All shortlisted participants for the Final Pitch will have priority admission interview opportunities for CSCI’s flagship programme, Global Research Enrichment and Technopreneurship (GREAT).
Congratulations again to all the winning teams!