PENANG, November 2015 – Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) IEEE Student Branch (USM IEEE SB) has achieved another milestone by winning the Silver prize at the 2015 Darrel Chong Student Activity Award recently. This award gives recognition for the activities organised by the IEEE bodies around the world that have meaningful impact to the society.

According to USM School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering student, Simon Yeoh Hong Boon, USM has been awarded for the success in one of its project, namely Techmentor. Techmentor is an initiative based on volunteer teaching, where facilitators called Techmentors will be trained beforehand to impart them with the necessary knowledge to guide participating secondary school students.

"This Techmentor project was initiated by the USM IEEE SB founder with the support from USM, several industry companies and state government. This is the first time in the history that a Student Branch from Malaysia to receive this global recognition ever since the award was introduced," he said.

Simon added that the Techmentor programme is a 6-month programme where the engineering undergraduates went to secondary schools to mentor the students on embedded system design.The school students learnt through a discovery-based method and were guided to source for relevant learning resources on the internet. They were awarded with various competency badges such as soldering skill, circuit design, C++ programming and so forth. At the end of the programme, the students designed a solution to the real-life problem that can be solved with embedded systems in their school, home or community and participated in the Young Innovate Malaysia 2014 competition.

"A total of 14 people from USM IEEE SB have volunteered themselves to help out in this Techmentor programme. A total of 9 secondary schools are mentored by our volunteers namely Chung Hwa High School, Union High School, Chung Ling Private High School, SMT TARP, CLHS Butterworth, SMJK Jit Sin, SMK Berapit, SMK Convent Bukit Mertajam and SMK Agama Nibong Tebal," mentioned by Simon.

IEEE, pronounced as "Eye-triple-E," stands for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. As the world's largest technical professional association, IEEE consists of engineers, scientists, and allied professionals. These include computer scientists, information technology professionals, physicists, medical doctors, and many others in addition to IEEE's electrical and electronics engineering core. For this reason, the organization no longer goes by the full name and it is referred to simply as IEEE.

IEEE, an association dedicated to advancing innovation and technological excellence for the benefit of humanity, is the world’s largest technical professional society. It is designed to serve professionals involved in all aspects of the electrical, electronic, and computing fields and related areas of science and technology that underlie modern civilization.

USM IEEE SB has achieved many successes, including 3rd Best Volunteer Award 2014 (Simon Yeoh Hong Boon) and 1st runner up for Outstanding Student Branch Award 2014 (Large Branch Category), Champion of R10 website competition (2015), National Champion for IEEEXtreme Competition (2014 and 2015) and IEEE Malaysia Student Leadership Award 2015 (Simon Yeoh Hong Boon and Tan Ting Feng).

Please click on the link below for further information on the global awards winner.
http://m.ieee.org/membership_services/membership/students/awards/chong.html

Text: Hafiz Meah Ghouse Meah