For the second year in a row, students from Republic Polytechnic’s Diploma in Industrial and Operations Management walked away winners at the Singapore International 3D Printing Competition.
Angel Loh, How Shiling, Wong Yun Wei and Gong Han submitted winning team and individual entries in the Vintage Toy and Functional Logo categories respectively. They edged out teams from the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University and Singapore University of Technology & Design in the Singapore Tertiary Student category.
“The logo theme was pretty competitive,” said Mr Lim Boon Hong, the facilitator in-charge. “For the vintage toy, I was quite happy with what has been designed and printed out. It is a simple mechanism but a fun idea which I suppose is one of the winning factors.”
In the Vintage Toy category, participants were tasked to come up with designs adapted from traditional toys but with new creative and engineering elements injected into them. The RP team came up with a toy where a mechanism will trigger the birds to peck each time the ball is swung.
The students worked through the March semester break as they were given only three weeks prior to the competition to come up with the concept and design. It was then printed out at RP’s 3D printer, a scarce resource where students only get to use it for competitions, outside their curriculum hours.
The RP students bagged $10,000 in prize money but donated a third of their winnings to the RP Needy Student Fund to help students from low income families afford basic expenses for school and tide over financial difficulties.
When asked about their donation to the fund, Angel Loh said: “We were happy that we won but the team felt that if we can give back it’ll feel more meaningful.”
Gong Han, whose entry in the Functional Logo category came up tops, added: “I simply wanted to give thanks to the school that had the facilities that enabled me to participate. The competition was a good experience.”
The 21-year-old’s winning entry, ‘Global 3D Centre’, will be considered among other category winners to be used as the logo for the Singapore Centre for 3D Printing, a $150million funded national research facility for 3D Printing.
