Innovative MA-Pencil by student wins James Dyson Award 2022 Malaysia national award

Since 2007, the James Dyson Awards have been an annual affair in 28 countries that sees engineering or design students helping to create innovative solutions to resolve the biggest problems facing our world and the winning entry for Malaysia dubbed an MA-Pencil is the most ambitious entry yet.

Every year, the James Dyson Award will select two national runners up and a national winner who will advance to the international stage of the competition where Sir James Dyson will peruse the entries and announce the winner this coming October 2022. You can check out the official page for the James Dyson Award here.

Who are the winners of the James Dyson Award 2022 national award for Malaysia?

For Malaysia, the prestigious James Dyson Award 2022 national awards go to a trio of truly innovative entries. This time around, Malaysia saw 138 entries from 37 universities, out of 1,658 entries globally. This impressive number of entries makes Malaysia one of the highest represented countries in this year’s James Dyson Award 2022.  

For 2022, the national winner is the MA-Pencil by Ms. Le Qi, a student at University Sains Malaysia that’s designed to help autistic children learn how to write independently.

Ms. Le Qi showcasing her award winning MA-Pencil design for the James Dyson Award 2022 national awards for Malaysia.

Next up, the runner up is a design called the Whalecro, a conceptual design by a team at APU that is an underwater propulsion vehicle that sucks water in through a series of motor-powered filters made of Velcro to capture microplastics in the water.

The other runner up entry is dubbed the SwiSH by a team at UiTM that aims to be an improved car jack that is more stable and safer to use to jack up a car.

Last year, the James Dyson Award 2021 national winners for Malaysia tackled the challenge creating a cost-effective and sustainable desalination pod to create potable water from sea water for underserved communities dubbed the WaterPod. 

The 2020 winner tackled another pressing problem for underserved communities – refrigeration – by creating a cooler fridge dubbed the KUNO that didn’t require electricity to work by relying on the principle of evaporative cooling. In 2019, the national winner created a unique utensil so that people with disabilities could eat without assistance. You can check out our prior James Dyson Award 2021, James Dyson Award 2020 and James Dyson Award 2019 winners here.

MA-Pencil – James Dyson Award 2022 Malaysia National Winner – What makes it so special?

In the spirit of Dyson to solve problems that others seem to ignore, the MA-Pencil addresses an underserved segment in a decisive fashion – that of children with autism. Created by one Le Qi, a final year industrial design student from University Sains Malaysia, the MA-Pencil is essentially a multifunctional pencil set that has been uniquely designed to help autistic children write independently by adding and gradually removing a series of attachments across three stages. 

The pencil also has an integrated speaker charged via a USB-C port that plays 10-second sound clips of animals to help retain the attention of children with autism. “Children with autism have challenges focusing on tasks and tend to grasp their pencil in a fist so the MA-Pencil is designed to help grip a pencil in the right way and improve their writing skill over time,” says Le Qi.

To ensure sturdiness and durability, the MA-Pencil uses silicone plastic that’s safe for children paired with break-resistant lead and has easy to grip curved surfaces, textured lines across its surface and a gripper to make it easier to wield that mimic aspects of animals including the tail of a tiger and the body of a fish by mixing and matching the parts. 

Over time as a child masters its usage, the various attachments are removed and it adopts the more familiar design of a pencil as we know it. As the national winner of the Malaysia leg of the James Dyson Award, Le Qi won RM27,900 to help her further develop her idea. 

“Everyone is different. Our needs, personalities, culture, language, age, and so on. I think the existence of inclusive design is necessary to create a better and more comfortable life for all,” said Le Qui. She adds that further research is needed and that the MA-Pencil is primarily designed to address the needs of children with autism and that children with other development or learning challenges may require different designs. “The MA-Pencil is primarily designed for children with autism. Children with other disabilities may require more specific purpose designs, ” adds Le Qi.