đź“ť Summary
The AIoTI Innovation Camp 2026 successfully concluded, providing international students with advanced skills in AI, IoT, and prototyping. The week-long program allowed students to work in groups to develop functional prototypes that addressed real-world problems, such as smart inventory management and secure storage. The students’ inventions were showcased to an expert panel, demonstrating their ability to enhance digital innovation skills and prepare for leadership roles in the tech industry.
JOHOR BAHRU, Jul 6 – The Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (AIoTI) Innovation Camp 2026 has successfully wrapped up its rigorous week-long curriculum, giving a diverse group of international students advanced coding, design thinking, and fast prototyping skills. A varied collection of ambitious innovators from France and Indonesia came together for the camp, hosted by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (FKE).
Throughout the program, the participants worked in collaborative groups to master Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), dashboard, creative coding, and functional prototype development.
The immersion program, which ran from June 28 to July 6, 2026, was carefully designed to close the gap between engineering theory and the practical, real-world applications of technology.
An extensive IoT session marked the beginning of the academic adventure. Students learned how to connect physical objects to the internet by integrating ESP32 microcontrollers—which act as the miniature “brains” of smart devices—using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) application programming interfaces (APIs). During the Artificial Intelligence (AI) phase, this fundamental technical expertise was seamlessly expanded.
Students utilised Tinkercode to construct innovative AI systems capable of smoothly manipulating physical IoT hardware modules, essentially teaching their machines how to make smart decisions based on environmental data.
As the initiative developed, the innovators used Laragon environments and the Vibe Coding framework in creative coding workshops to broaden their digital toolkits.
Working under tight deadlines, the student teams had to think like real-world inventors. They engaged in rapid prototyping, which is the process of quickly building and assembling a physical model of an idea to test how it works.
A significant portion of their time was spent troubleshooting—painstakingly searching for, diagnosing, and fixing errors in their software code—to ensure their final engineering prototypes were fully working, stable, and functional.
Student teams effectively combined these approaches while working under tight deadlines to design, refine, and construct fully functional engineering prototypes meant to address real-world problems.
The teams demonstrated their integrated AI and IoT prototypes to an expert panel for technical peer evaluation, proving they could solve real-world problems.
Their inventions, such as Door Mate, Bin Sense, Smart Inventory, Secure Store and Beep Bin have been successfully developed and are well-functioning. Ultimately, the high-impact program successfully guarantees that the participating international students can effectively enhance their digital innovation skills, preparing them to become the tech leaders of tomorrow.
A competitive Project Presentation where teams showcased their integrated AI and IoT prototypes to an expert panel for technical peer evaluation marked the culmination of the demanding academic period. The program guarantees that the participating international students can effectively enhance their digital innovation skills.
This article was co-authored by Ir. Ts. Dr. Fauzan Khairi Che Harun, and Dr. Mohd Afzan Othman
