Young Maker Challenge @ American Corners 2019

This national level program focused on students from Bottom Forty (B40) Group and was organized by UTM Centre for Student Innovation and Technology Entrepreneurship (UTM XCITE) with U.S. Embassy Kuala Lumpur being the main sponsor. Other sponsors include MyMaker IoT Lab@Cyberjaya (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission) and Cytron Technologies Sdn. Bhd, Penang. The duration of this program was from December 2018 to May 2019 (6 months).

The program involves 7 states namely Sabah, Sarawak, Kelantan, Penang, Kedah, Perlis and Johor, which were coordinated and organized by university partners namely UMS, UNIMAS, UMK, USM, UniMAP and UTM respectively. This program was open to local undergraduate students from all Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) as mentors and local B40 secondary school students as participant throughout Malaysia. This program has lured active involvement of volunteers among university students where they were actively involved in organizing a series of programs such as boot camps, mentoring as project advisors and also follow through their juniors’ innovative project in their assigned Secondary Schools.

The objectives of the program were to:

1. Provide opportunities to under privileged student (B40 Group) in Science, Technologies, Engineering, Arts – Design, & Mathematic (STEAM).
2. Develop life-long skills such as innovative problem-solving, Design Thinking, Resilience, Persistence, Collaboration and Pitching.
3. Inspire Continuous Learning through systematic exposure to open-source software or hardware.