"Madball", a student entrepreneurship team of Tsing Hua University, under the guidance of Yang Shang-Hua, a professor of electrical engineering, recently won the Top Maker Team title from the 214 teams of colleges and universities across Taiwan through the "EC-SOS" Platform competition of the Ministry of Education.

The "Madball" team consists of junior students from Tsing Hua University, Lin Bo-Zhen, Lu Jia-Ru, Wu Pei-Yu and Chen Guan-Yu, a student of the Tsing Hua Electric Power College. Inspired by the baseball game, the four students want to make the baseball players’ training more effective. The creative concept "Ball Stabilizer" (named Madball) can be installed on all major brand pitching machines to improve the stability of the ball and help the player to train with all kinds of pitches. A high batting average can increase the value of the player, which can increase the team's winning percentage, thereby increasing the number of visitors and the sales of teams’ products. And Madball has already attracted the international baseball and softball manufacturers to discuss about the cooperation.

Lin Bo-Zhen, who is a baseball player in his department team, said: "Because I love baseball so much, I often think about how Taiwan can train a batter like Chen Jin-Feng who has the all-sided ability." The team was a group from “Tsing Hua Innovation and Entrepreneurship Course”, in the course the students is required to produce a finished product and participate in the competition at the end of the course.

"I want to train myself to practice batting the inner corner straight ball, but the pitching machine on the market can't do this." Lin Bo-Jun said that the pitching machine changes with various factors such as weather humidity, machine motor, artificial adjustment angle, and strength. Therefore, the landing point will be randomly distributed in any position of the strike zone, and it is impossible to stably launch at the accurate point.

In order to find out how to make the pitching machine launch the ball stably, the team once thought about the method of simulating gas jet, magnetic guidance, etc., to see if the path of the ball can be stabilized, but the problem could not be efficiently. The team spent day and night stayed at Tsing Hua baseball stadium for 8 days, launched thousands of balls, carefully observed the operation mode of the ball machine, the angle of the ball into the ball machine, etc. After day and night observation, team member Chen Guan-Yu found that "If the angle and the force is fixed, the ball which pitched by the machine will tend to be stable.” With this important discovery, the team immediately simulated the data to design a ring-shaped “ball stabilizer” and used 3D printer to produce model, now they are working on the patent.

The birth of Madball immediately attracted the attention of international manufacturers. Through the "Tsing Hua Innovation and Entrepreneurship Course", Mr. Zhang Yun-Zhi, the general manager of Taiwan's sports marketing leader, PCGBROS, assisted the team in the planning of the operation, and contacted the relevant staff to give back to them. With the information; international baseball and sports goods company George Brett agents and team to discuss cooperation, it is expected to bring the prototype to the US Major League Polo Test this year, if there is no problem, mass production will be carried out. The team also received the project strategy planning and operation mode of Mr. Chen Zhao-Wen, the former general manager of the Hon Hai Company.

Professor Yang Shang-Hua said: "The most difficult thing for the Madball team is to accurately identify the pain points of the industry, and to receive many industry resources to their teams. Not many university students can have such outstanding experience and performance."

Professor Yang Shang-Hua divided the classmates into several groups and designed the professional courses for each team. He recruited famous entrepreneurs and general managers in various fields of the enterprise to teach the complete product development process, including identifying needs and establishing Business models, market analysis, and prototypes of input design, and development plans for products, as well as execution planning and financial analysis.

"At the beginning, I heard that Teacher Yang’s entrepreneurship program was very special. As soon as I found out, the teacher wants us to start a real entrepreneur." Lin Bo-Jun said, "The four people in our team play the role of the company's operators, business, finance, and engineers. The division will keep an eye on the progress of our products. We must complete the progress in the product development schedule and report to the division. Although it is tired, it is very solid!" Chen Guan-Yu also said: "The teacher teaches us how to find problems and come up with solutions. I didn't understand finances and how to find patents before. I also learned how to complete this product in a short period of time."

The team said that the ultimate goal of the product is to develop a Madball that can stably simulate different pitcher paths, helping players to practice various pitches. The Madball team has also made it to the Tsing Hua Entrepreneurship Day Root Cup Entrepreneurship Competition Finals and looks forward to an excellent performance.