HKUST Annual Report 2016-17

33 students made regular visits to old people’s homes and helped seniors write their memoirs. The three Schools also co-organized the credit-bearing Underwater Robot Community Engagement Project. In this initiative, HKUST students serve as teachers to guide a mixed group of younger students – primary, secondary, the hearing impaired and ethnic minorities – to build underwater robots. A record number of 300 students from 42 primary and secondary schools signed up for the four-day event in 2017. Individually, the School of Science engaged in a variety of social endeavors. Students continued to participate in the University Student Sponsorship Programme in Wildlife Conservation, run in collaboration with Ocean Park Conservation Foundation, Hong Kong. This involved students in research projects, with field trips to Mainland China and other Asian countries. At home, social service team SCI/NUCLEUS helped out in the local community. Selected students served as Social Leaders to arrange different voluntary services and lead team members. Participants included students, staff and alumni. The School of Engineering organized its first Technology Leadership and Entrepreneurship Youth Camp for junior secondary school students. During the five-day summer program, participants had the opportunity to shadow HKUST students as well as visit their start-ups at the Hong Kong Science Park. The camp provided a practical introduction to entrepreneurship through a team project to formulate a business plan for a technology product. The School’s Center for Global & Community Engagement also arranged more than 20 workshops at InnoCarnival 2016 to promote engineering knowledge to primary and secondary school students in a fun way. On the sustainability front, faculty from the Division of Environment and Sustainability of the Interdisciplinary Programs Office continued to lead forward the “Community EXPLORE Project – from Science to Action”, a three-year initiative funded by HSBC Hong Kong Bank Foundation. The project aims to enhance high school students’ technical knowledge and skills in monitoring air quality in their communities and identify scientifically the sources of pollution. A total of 48 schools covering over 700 secondary school students, teachers and technicians have benefited from the scheme to date.