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    GESA Makers Fair
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    ABOUT

    The Ghana Engineering Students Association (GESA) Makers Fair is a Science and Technology Competition and Exhibition being organized by GESA in association with Creativity Group-KNUST. The Fair seeks to bring together creativity based on science and technology.

    RATIONALE

    In Ghana, a number of youthful ideas are locked up in “boxes” as a result of lack of appropriate platforms and facilities to help nurture and develop them into prototypes and products or processes for enterprise development and job creation. The students’ competition, which will be organized within the framework of GESA Maker Fair, is therefore a platform which provides opportunity to KNUST engineering students to demonstrate their innovative and creative ideas. It will enable students to engage in hands-on scientific and engineering activities that can lead to products and processes of market value. Innovation and creativity among students can be unearthed early enough to receive the required motivation to carry on with many inventions and technological solutions. We believe that the combination of brilliant ideas from diverse disciplines and teamwork can make science and engineering students develop practical and appropriate solutions to accelerate national development.

    GOAL AND OBJECTIVES

    The goal of the GESA Makers Fair is to promote collaborative innovation and creativity among students pursuing engineering at KNUST.

    The specific objectives are, in summary, to:
    • Encourage innovation and teamwork in design process and product development among KNUST engineering students
    • Create a community of like-minded students who can share information and resources
    • Create a platform for students with brilliant ideas to showcase their ideas to potential investors and entrepreneurs.
    • Bring together local innovators, students and faculty members to promote market-driven innovations

    APPROACH

    GESA Makers Fair will be organized in two parts:
    • Competition
    • Exhibition


    This proposal focuses on the competition part of the GESA Makers Fair. The section below describes the competition and the adopted approach.

    THE COMPETITION

    The competition is open to all students pursuing undergraduate programs in engineering at KNUST. It is expected that teams will be made up of students from different departments but this is not a requirement. Students who wish to participate in the competition may present one project and should form a team to work on the project. However, the number of students in each group will not exceed five (5). To participate, each team will have to register and apply online. Some of the information required during the application process includes name of team, name of project and name of individuals in a team.

    Projects will involve the application of at least one of the following fields of study: science, technology, engineering and business. After review of applications, teams will be invited for interview by a panel of experts and Creativity Group leaders. Project ideas will be reviewed based on feasibility, knowledge about proposed project, how innovative and potential a project is plus other criteria developed to guide the competition. After the review selected projects will be funded with a commitment from the team to completely design and build the proposed project. Each team will be assigned a technical assistant from Creativity Group and faculty members to help in the design and making. Students participating in the competition will be required to do the following on the exhibition and awards day:
    • Submit a report on how they went about their project.
    • Give a 10 minute PowerPoint presentation of their projects.
    • Demonstrate and explain the workings of their project to the judges, invited guests, lecturers, members of staff and students.
    • Answer questions from judges and audience.


    Projects will be judged and marks will be awarded based on the following criteria:

    • Originality and creativity.
    • Cost affordability of project
    • How innovative it is.
    • Ability to follow engineering design process
    • Practicality and its applicability in society and industry.
    • Its ability to solve societal and industrial problems
    • Potential for up-scaling and enterprise development


    Marks will also be awarded for good presentation skills, content and composure. There will be a Vodafone short code that will enable students to vote for their favorite project(s) and this vote will constitute 30% of the marks awarded. Prizes will be awarded to the winner (s), the first runner-up and the second runner-up.

    BUSINESS AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

    The Technology Consultancy Centre (TCC) and Center for Business Development (CBD) are proposed to provide advisory services and mentorship in technology entrepreneurship, business and incubation to help select viable project ideas and projects for possible up-scaling to commercial level

    • They will also serve as advisors and business incubator partners for the whole program.
    • Teams will be encouraged to seek technical and business advice during the design stage.
    • The Directors of TCC and CBD will serve as panel members for project evaluation.

    TIMELINE

    In summary, the KNUST Students competition is planned for a one month period -starting with the launching of the program on Monday 1st September 2014 and ending on Tuesday 30th September 2014.

    Publicity about competition and opening of on-line application (submission of ideas) will start from 14th April and 28th April, 2014 respectively.

    On-line application will require students to submit an idea and registration of a team. (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/16OI
    zEJWh4lBWKi6aTUbznY71IWh0z8KNfMU0phF6OYo/viewform    )

    After closing of the deadline for submission a selected panel of faculty members and external evaluators will evaluate the submitted ideas from 7th August to 15th August, 2014 for the first phase of evaluation.

    Projects and teams that pass the first evaluation will be invited on the 15th to 17th August, 2014 to the meet the selected panel of evaluators for further evaluation of their idea and proposed projects. After the in-person, evaluation, the panel of evaluators will selected 7 projects as the finalist for the main competition.

    The competition is scheduled to be launched on the 25th August, 2014 which will be followed by a 4-days of orientation for the 7 teams; 26th to 30th August, 2014.

    Exhibition and presentation of projects by the various teams is scheduled to take place on the 30th September, 2014.

    Get in touch with us

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    • Creativity Group,
      Technology Consultancy Centre,
      college of Engineering,
      KNUST,
      Kumasi-Ghana.
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    • Founder
      +233–24-933‑6773
      President
      +233–20-939‑4141
      Vice President
      +233–26-638‑1662