One of Ten Winners at PUSPIPTEK’s “PIF Innovation Project”

Wanting to achieve more than just academic success, three (3) Mechanical Engineering freshmen managed to be amongst the ten groups of university students who were chosen in the PIF Innovation Project competition held by PUSPIPTEK (Center of Research for Science and Technology) earlier this October. The competition was held from September 23rd to October 3rd 2019 in PUSPIPTEK campus area, South Tangerang. One of the representatives of Sampoerna University, Nisa’ Khoiriyah, recounted why they wanted to take part in the national science and technology competition. “We have lecturers who are actively guiding us and encouraging us to participate in such competitions. And as freshmen, we also don’t want to waste time. We can start early to succeed,” she affirmed. “We want to apply our knowledge to create a simple thing that we’ve never seen before in Indonesia,” Nisa’ explained. Because she often experiences dehydration, Nisa’ thought it would be great to invent a solution to this problem. Within ten days, Nisa’ and two of her classmates (Asriyanti and Given Chris Yuenan) experimented at the university’s STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) laboratory to come up with a functional prototype that embodies perfectly Nisa’s idea, “Drink Reminder Bottle”. It functions as a reminder for its user to drink more water to prevent dehydration. According to Given, the prototype works like this: the bottle notifies us whether we have consumed fresh water in a certain period of time within a day or not. It automatically warns us to drink fresh water in the bottle if we have not drunk it yet during a specific time frame. “We set a notification so that we are reminded to drink 150 ml every hour in a day,” he further explained. As one of the winning groups, they were invited to the exhibition by the end of the competition in South Tangerang. Interestingly, they were the youngest students joining and winning the big ten lineup. The other winning groups are junior and senior students who obviously have more experience and knowledge. PIF Innovation Project is a scientific competition event open for Indonesian university students. It is part of PUSPIPTEK Innovation Festival (PIF) 2019 and aims to facilitate, motivate, and serve as youths’ hub in which they can compete with their innovative works. This year, the competition was joined by 131 participants of 262 universities throughout Indonesia. (*/)