[Photo provided to China Daily]

He worked for multinational Huawei Technologies as an industrial designer after his master's studies at Tsinghua University in June 2016.

He is now involved in the designing, modeling, producing, promoting and other aspects of developing a new mobile phone.

"It's the same process as what we did to make our product in the competition," Cao recalls.

Another team member, Zhao Hansen, a chemistry major who was responsible for hardware development in the competition, also gained inspiration and confidence from the event.

The biggest problem Zhao encountered during the competition was to upgrade the button on their product to a touch-sensitive one. "From the engineering design to the production, I had to solve the problems one by one. But I actually enjoyed the process."

The competition also inspired Zhao in interdisciplinary fields.

Last year, he started on his master's degree, including data analysis and math modeling in his studies.

"Before the competition, when I saw something that was inconvenient or served as an obstacle, I might just have talked about it," says Zhao.

"But ever since I became a maker, I'd think of ways to resolve these problems, to try and make something to change the situation and help society."