Road safety you can dance to, and three instruments that play themselves

Our team entered the CTB national round with a piece of square dance, raising senior citizens’ road-safety awareness on their daily commute.

I interviewed 20 senior residents from various communities in Wuxi to investigate road-safety risks during daily travel and the barriers they face in accessing safety information, identifying the key issues. We then incorporated traffic-safety knowledge into the music and choreography of square dancing, designing an interactive promotional format suitable for older adults so they could understand and retain safe-travel knowledge. The project advanced to the national round, and the safety content accumulated 3,000+ views online.

I integrated an Arduino control board, an MP3 playback module and physical buttons to build an interactive music box that supports independent song selection, track switching and playback control.

I wrote seven control programs for button recognition and audio management, then optimised button response and playback stability through two rounds of hardware debugging. I composed three original piano pieces, incorporating natural sound elements such as wind, birdsong and flowing water, and completed track import and playback testing to explore how music can support children’s emotional regulation.

I designed an automatic playing device that clamps onto a standard acoustic guitar, using servo motors to simulate left-hand fingering and right-hand strumming — a mechanical playing solution that requires no modification to the instrument itself.

The device implements a process for importing sheet music files and image recognition, converting musical information into motor control commands and adjusting fingering and strumming motions through automatic calibration. I planned an onboard display and a Wi-Fi web-based control interface to support song selection and coordinated control of multiple motor groups.

With a team I collected data on transportation, venue operations and energy consumption for the Super Bowl since the 1990s, in order to analyse the carbon emissions and environmental impact of major sporting events.

We developed a dual-model approach combining SDP and LCI, incorporating an Environmental Sustainability Score (ESS) to compare the environmental sustainability of different events and host cities. I contributed to data processing, model analysis and paper writing for a collaborative 25-page research report proposing emission-reduction recommendations for event transportation and urban infrastructure.