The National Grand Final of Shell NXplorers Malaysia took place in early November 2021. Although students faced disruptions to their learning due to the pandemic, this helped them to look at things differently and ultimately produce some of the most innovative competition entries to date.
A new way of thinking
The NXplorers facilitators were extremely impressed with this year's entries, recognising a significant growth in the depth of the students’ thinking, and their ability to relate to real-world challenges.
“The pandemic has made students relate with more of the issues that are now impacting their communities. Many past student projects have been more focused around the agriculture and energy element of the Nexus approach. However in 2021, we saw a focus on new real-world challenges such as food apps that allow access to food banks, apps that look at drain clogging issues and facemask littering.”
Zulkifli Baba Noor, Shell Programme Manager for NXplorers Malaysia
Inspiring innovations
One particularly notable project came from Team Meta, who live in a flood-prone community. They innovated a solution to mitigate flooding and its subsequent effects. On the day they pitched this idea at the state finals, their area was flooded and faced power disruptions. Despite this they were able to pull through and come out as the winning champion team for Sabah state.
Congratulations to Malaysia’s national champion team, De 3 Lions, who created an affordable and innovative chicken feeder solution to minimise wastage and maintain chicken feed quality. The solution consists of automated embedded systems (Arduino), specially designed and printed 3D components as well as a mobile app to monitor and control the entire system remotely while providing informative support to chicken farmers. You can view all of the National finalist student projects on the YouTube links below:
Looking ahead
The NXplorers team have some very ambitious plans for the year ahead, with a bigger focus on secondary schools. The team has been working with the Malaysian government to leverage their online education portal which would provide NXplorers access to all Malaysian secondary schools. This would mean over 1.5 million students across the country could connect to the NXplorers programme via the online portal to gain extra school credits. The work is now complete and will be launched in the middle of this year.
“Shell NXplorers makes a huge impact on our lives. With this programme, we know what the world needs. In our daily lives, we try to observe and understand the impact behind every single thing. Not only that, when it comes to problem solving, we try to think about what we can do to solve this problem. Shell NXplorers not only changed our lives, but it makes us the person who has the determination to change the world and society.” IT Warriors, SMK Bintulu, Sarawak
