A 14-year-old girl performed “sheep face recognition”?

What are you most worried about when playing games?

Were you having a blast in the canyon, only to be kicked out by a pop-up window?

Ever since the anti-addiction system added facial recognition verification, minors can no longer use their parents’ or grandparents’ accounts to “extend their time”. It’s a love-hate relationship!

But have you ever thought that this technology can actually be used in other places, and the objects can even be "non-human" .

In the following story, the girl completed the **“Sheep Face Recognition”** project with her own hands and realized her childhood dream.

Let us listen to her own words -

“My childhood dream is now within reach.”

Hello everyone, my name is Fan Wenhua, I am 14 years old and a student at the Third Middle School of Chayouqian Banner, Inner Mongolia.

When I was young, I lived with my grandparents in a remote pastoral area. My most vivid memory was herding sheep with my grandfather. My grandfather asked me to count the sheep, but I just couldn’t count them all.

If you have never let sheep go, you may not know that more than a hundred sheep are walking in front of you, and each of them looks almost the same. What's more, they will run around, so it is difficult to notice if one or two are missing.

In cartoons, the protagonist can take out all kinds of magical props to help people around him solve problems. When I was a child, I also wanted a machine that could count sheep so that I could help my grandfather stop losing sheep.

Later, my parents took me to school in town, and I began to come into contact with a lot of scientific knowledge in textbooks. Although they may be far away from me, I still eager to try and create.

Fortunately, our school was selected by Tencent Growth Guardian to build a future classroom, where we learned a variety of science and technology courses, such as 3D printing, VR, programming, etc. We were even able to collaborate with teachers and classmates to complete a science and technology project!

I suddenly realized that my childhood dream of counting sheep seemed to be within reach.

Even a small idea is not easy to realize.

The teacher formed a scientific innovation team with me and three other male classmates. When discussing the project selection, they put forward many grand ideas, such as "letting robots replace humans into space" and "designing satellites that can change the climate"... and the "intelligent sheep counting device" that I wanted was the most inconspicuous topic here.

But the teacher finally chose me! Because he thought this project was closer to life, and there happened to be a sheep pasture in his hometown, which was just right for practice.

But when we really started trying, we found that even such a seemingly insignificant small project was difficult to implement successfully.

The first problem was the material of the simulated pasture. There were no lamb models on the market, so the teacher suggested that we use the 3D printer in the future classroom to print them ourselves.

Each print takes several hours to see the results, but the finished product is often missing a head or limbs, and is completely waste.

This dealt us a big blow. No one expected that the first step would be so difficult.

But I didn’t give up. As soon as the get out of class was over, I ran to the future classroom and modeled and printed over and over again. Finally, I successfully made a room full of various lambs. I felt such a sense of accomplishment!

Now that we have the sheep, the next step is to collect data on each sheep, so that the computer can learn to identify which ones are sheep and thus train the sheep counting model.

However, there was another problem when taking photos of the model sheep with the mini camera. Since the model sheep was made of white, most of the photos were overexposed and it was impossible to identify the details.

The discussions between my teammates and I did not go well. We couldn't help but blame each other, which made the progress of our project even slower.

The turning point came after a biology class, when the teacher said that the offspring of two white sheep might have black genes. Suddenly, an idea occurred to me: Couldn’t our simulated sheep be other colors?

We did it right away. We painted the lambs black and finally they were successfully identified!

Bringing the sheep counting model to reality

Next, how do we move this sheep counting model from the small simulated ranch to reality?

To be honest, this technology is still too difficult for us to achieve now, but fortunately we have the help of Tencent Growth Guardian.

In order to realize our wish, the teachers of the technical team made a machine that can collect data in reality. It can not only quickly identify a variety of different organisms, but can even monitor the temperature and humidity of the sheep pen!

When I thought about my childhood dream coming true, I became full of energy and couldn’t wait to share the good news with my grandfather.

But we soon faced a new wave of blows.

It turns out that in reality, just selecting a suitable position for the camera requires repeated debugging.

After finally connecting the wires, I discovered that the lambs did not walk into the camera one by one in order, and the values ​​were always changing.

Although our sheep counting system is not 100% accurate at present, I believe that through continuous adjustment and improvement, it will become the most useful smart helper for herders in the future!

I will also study hard and get in touch with the bigger world, then put these new and useful scientific knowledge into my head and tell them to my grandfather.

I believe that he will also be able to feel the convenience and happiness that technological development has brought to life, and that is enough!

Let small dreams shine into big reality

Fan Wenhua's story comes from the seventh issue of "Shine! Youth". Unlike the previous issues about sports, this one is about scientific exploration, but it is also a journey of the protagonist chasing his dreams. Through scientific and creative activities, 14-year-old Fan Wenhua realized her childhood dream, and this experience of overcoming difficulties step by step made her gain confidence and a sense of accomplishment.

This is exactly what we are building for the classroom of the future:

Let children in these educationally backward areas receive a good scientific education, develop their own problem-solving thinking patterns, and encourage them to actively pursue a better future.

In the past, 3D printing, VR, programming, and other technological concepts that are commonplace among children in big cities were just words in books for Fan Wenhua and her classmates.

But it is also because of this that they have unlimited imagination and can come up with creative ideas such as "sheep face recognition".

Everyone has had innocent dreams as a child, but in the process of becoming an adult, these dreams may be eroded by reality, leaving many regrets, so we hope to do our best to protect the budding of these dreams so that more children can grow up without regrets.

Whether it is about sports or technology, they still have many hurdles to overcome in becoming the adults they want to be.

All we can do is to help them walk more steadily and firmly in the pursuit of their dreams, but they still have to overcome the difficulties and obstacles on their own.

I hope the stories in the show can bring more courage to every viewer to write a better life!