Not long ago, the seventh China International "Internet plus" College Students' innovation and entrepreneurship competition final came to a close. Yin Yujie, an undergraduate of the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications School of AI, led his team, which is only 19.8 years old, to win the gold medal of the high school leader.

The work of Yin Yujie's team is an artificial intelligence creation platform for national music. Its inspiration comes from Yin Yujie's simple desire to promote national music over the years. Before entering the University, this was only his simple wish, but after he was admitted to Beiyou, Yin Yujie found that he had a chance to turn his wish into reality.

This opportunity is the "young goose program" carried out by the university among the undergraduate freshmen.

An attempt

Speaking of the origin of the "young goose plan", we should also trace the time back to 2015.

That year, Shahe campus of Beijing University of Posts and telecommunications was officially opened, and freshmen were moved to the new campus as a whole. In order to enrich the after-school life of these students, after some discussion, several teachers of the school of information and communication engineering decided to provide some open source hardware for freshmen to give full play to their free play, supplemented by the help of teachers to see if they can make some small inventions.

"What we didn't expect was that these students really made some interesting things," Ji Yang, a professor of the Academy, recalled in an interview with China Science Daily.

Encouraged teachers decided to expand the scope of this curriculum reform experiment to all freshmen in the following year, and began to design a special curriculum system of engineering introduction course to cooperate with students' scientific and creative activities. In December of that year, the students' works took shape one after another. The college decided to organize the first freshman introduction work exhibition and invited relevant leaders and teachers inside and outside the school to visit.

It was through this exhibition that sun Hongxiang, then director of the Academic Affairs Office of Beijing University of Posts and telecommunications, noticed the strong innovation potential contained in the freshmen group, and immediately began to organize research and formulate the "young goose plan" for the undergraduate freshmen of Beijing University of Posts and telecommunications and encourage their innovation and enlightenment.

At present, the "young goose program" has become an important part of the freshman engineering education of Beijing University of Posts and telecommunications. "The school has approved about 600 projects every year." according to Wang Han, deputy director of the Academic Affairs Office of the school, the school fully adopts the project management system mode of docking with real enterprises for students entering the program.

"For example, after the project is approved, students will be required to submit weekly project reports every week. Many students do not understand the necessity of this. But in fact, we found in our communication with Huawei and other top enterprises in the industry that they require employees to submit weekly reports every week. If students receive this training in advance, they can adapt to this work rhythm after employment," Wang Han said.

In addition, at present, Beiyou has one Beiyou win base and 19 characteristic innovation practice bases, which are also open to students of the "young goose program" free of charge. On experimental platforms such as 3D printing laboratory and robot comprehensive training laboratory, these freshmen can also do experiments with senior students. In addition, the school also organized a series of lectures and salons for them. "We hope to create a real and open environment for these newcomers to the field of scientific research and guide them to explore freely," Wang Han said.

A subversion

In Wang Han's view, the greatest significance of the "young goose plan" is to subvert the traditional cognition of Cultivating College Students' innovative ability. In traditional cognition, freshmen can only involve the process from "cognition" to "verification", and the design experiment to comprehensive experiment needs the support of sophomore knowledge.

However, the teaching measures of Engineering Introduction Course for practice and innovation and "young goose plan" have obviously broken this traditional cognition. "Usually, a student needs to accumulate knowledge and professional training in the first three years of university before he can build a system on a certain problem in his senior year, but we hope to guide students to complete the work of 'building a system' for a specific problem in their freshman year." Ji Yang said that in the imagination of many teachers, this reversal of order is not in line with the traditional sense of "step by step" The teaching design is, but the reality is that "freshmen have a strong thirst for knowledge, fresh imagination and creativity, and the works of a considerable number of freshmen are even better than those of some seniors".

Lu Xiaodong, a researcher at the school of education of Peking University, has found through research that colleges and universities can challenge students with incomplete knowledge in freshmen and sophomores, and fully show them the frontier unknown problems. Among them, some students who accept the challenge will carry out problem-solving centered self-learning while learning step by step, and may make contributions in the process of working with teachers. New engineering education such as "young goose program" provides an opportunity for such unconventional autonomous learning and exploration.

In Ji Yang's view, the implementation of innovative freshman engineering education is also of great significance, that is, to plant a seed of innovation in the hearts of freshmen.

"We hope that in the freshman year, students will have a relatively clear understanding of the connotation of innovation, get rid of the simple theoretical indoctrination in the classroom, and let them taste the taste of innovation in the confusion of facing difficulties and the joy of solving problems again and again." Ji Yang said that engineering innovation involves many factors. Once students have the seeds of longing for innovation in their hearts, Will spontaneously absorb "nutrition and water" from the environment. "We hope to create such an engineering innovation atmosphere for engineering students from the beginning."

A guarantee

An interesting phenomenon is that before the "young goose program", Beiyou students often came into contact with the college students' innovation and entrepreneurship training program (Dachuang for short) in their sophomore or junior year. Every time when preparing for a major innovation, students are often busy looking for problems, data and breakthrough in the first three months.

After the launch of the "young goose program", Wang Han found that almost all the work done by students in the early stage of the big innovation was included in the relevant projects of the "young goose program". "When students apply for big innovation projects again, they can save a lot of time in the early exploration." she said that the implementation of the "young goose plan" is equivalent to extending the original student innovation chain of the school.

However, the extension of the innovation chain also brings another problem, that is, how to stimulate teachers' enthusiasm. The plan undertakes the task of laying the foundation for students, and requires the silent efforts of teachers. "After all, not every seed can 'bear fruit' in the end. In this extended innovation chain, junior or senior is the time for students to really 'achieve results'. At this time, people often don't pay attention to the' young goose plan 'at the front of the innovation chain," Ji Yang said.

According to the regulations of Beijing post, students who have participated in the "young goose program" and successfully approved the project can find a number of teachers in the school as the instructor of the project. According to the current 600 applications per year, there are at least hundreds of teachers engaged in this work. For these teachers, the school has issued a number of measures to encourage them. "For example, teachers' guidance of the 'young goose plan' can calculate their post workload. At the same time, in the work of teachers' evaluation of professional titles, the school has also included this work into the evaluation conditions," Wang Han said.

However, not all schools can do this. According to Ji Yang, the effects of freshman engineering education in different schools are different. One of the important reasons for these differences is whether the school can ensure the participation enthusiasm of teachers.

"Most colleges and universities start this kind of education from scratch in the freshman stage, so they need a group of sentimental teachers to 'break through'. However, to ensure the continuous development and large-scale popularization of relevant work, it is obviously not enough to rely on feelings alone. It is better to make more innovations and clear provisions in the incentive mechanism, which is also another benefit brought to us by the" young goose plan " A revelation, "Ji Yang said.