IdeasJam by Garage@EEE continues to drive the entrepreneurial spirit in NTU students

Garage@EEE recently concluded one of the Flagship events IdeasJam. It is a 4-Day long ideathon that encourages innovative thinking to bring out their inner entrepreneur and solve prevalent problems with technology. This year the theme of IdeasJam is the SG2030 green plan as we aim to help improve the world with the unique and creative ideas these students create. The event is open to all University, Junior College and Polytechnic students across Singapore. 

More than 200 students signed up for this event with around 70% being from NTU and 30% being from other universities. The event also had the support of various industry partners. The evens also had mentors who helped guide the participants with their pitch. One of the mentors is Mr Robin Teurlings who is the founder and CEO of The Startup Buddy had this to say. “IdeasJam was a great opportunity for the Zero Emissions Fund to get a sense of what is cooking in the entrepreneurial brains at NTU. I enjoyed working with some of the smartest students right now in Singapore and I am sure we will be seeing some very interesting startups in the future which were born during this competition". Another of our mentors, Ms Chieng Yu Siang who is from the Business Incubation Project Manager at Schneider Electric also had positive comments about the event. "It’s refreshing to see so many entrepreneurial students come together from different faculties to solve the most pressing issues on sustainability! IdeasJam 2022 was a great platform to inspire the changemakers!", she said.

The winning teams were especially impressive. The first-place winner is Team Industria. Their pitch aims to provide environmental makeovers for buildings. The Team said “As we move to a more urbanized future, we shall see increased average temperature, noise pollution, and air pollution. Hence to reduce the effects of these, we came up with Bryowall. Bryowall is a bio-receptive concrete seeded with moss that can be applied to buildings on rooftops and as panels on the sides, which provides a cooling effect, reduces air pollution, acts as a natural sound barrier, and stabilize humidity.”

The second-place winner is Team Sentosa15 whose pitch was Gcrowd, which is a crowdfunding platform that enables students to get funding and human capital for their sustainable ideas on campus in the easiest way. Their mission is to empower students to become the game changers and green leaders of the future!

Finally in third place was Team Paryavaran, who presented NutrIoTion, an IoT-based solution that helps prevent good food from getting wasted. It involves the strategic placement of gas and image sensors on crates carrying perishables, values from which are sent to a data dashboard for every inventory manager to better track the health of perishables to avoid unnecessary wastage. Team Paryavaran also won there was also the People's choice award and Best pre-u team was from Raffles Junior College (RJC). The team from RJC was called BugisSoupMaster and proposed an app called “localife”. The app would allow users identify any flora and fauna in Singapore with an immersive augmented reality experience. Through this app, the students hoped to educate users and spread awareness on the wildlife that Singaporean would inevitably encounter as Singapore transitions into a City in Nature. Incorporating a virtual garden, the app allows users to obtain seeds from observations and grow them into large collections.