Innovation Lab
STEM-projects for high schools
KU Leuven faculty of Engineering’s Innovation Lab is an initiative to enthuse high school students to become engineers and scientists by having them build an actual real-life device. In project days at their local schools, students are challenged to design and assemble themselves hardware and software to achieve a given task, serving society.
Electrooculography (EOG) project
One of the challenges developed within InnovationLab is the EOG project: Build an electrooculograph eye motion sensor to control a device. Patients with, for example, ALS cannot control their arm muscles precisely making it hard to steer a wheelchair, or control a PC mouse. The students develop their own hardware to measure the bio-potential present around the eye, decide how to translate the analog signal to digital, design a smart algorithm to recognise looking left, right, up and down, and, finally, design a game where a wheelchair moves through a maze, controlled by these eye movements.
Participating schools in Flanders receive a box containing the required hardware, software and manuals for the complete project. All material is compatible with a standard desktop computer. Students design and assemble the new hardware components on top of a 5 by 10 cm custom Innovation Lab circuit board. Solutions to the software challenges are expressed in an intuitive, programmable MIT Scratch(-like) environment. Innovation Lab also organizes teach-the-teacher trainings to participating high school teachers.
More information: https://eng.kuleuven.be/innovationlab/project
Poker project
The students program a pokerbot in a visual programming language. An interactive online tutorial is provided in which students familiarize themselves with strategies and probability theory. The created bots are continuously submitted to our servers and play an online poker tournament.
More information: https://eng.kuleuven.be/innovationlab/project
