← All openings · Paid research internship · two tracks
A child draws something, AI turns it into a 3D model, and a printer has to make it real. Two tracks, at the two ends of that sentence. Say which one is yours.
What we need
All majors are welcome — passion is what matters. Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Design and Materials Science are natural fits — and so is an obsessive maker from any discipline at all. These are:
Track A — Model generation & print-readiness · our primary need
Take real children's drawings through our software and measure, honestly, how many come out genuinely printable. Catalogue every failure mode: non-manifold geometry, overhangs with no support, walls thinner than the nozzle, the thin part that would snap when a ten-year-old drops it.
Print profiles, orientation, supports, scale defaults — the difference between "it downloaded" and "a child is holding it."
In words they understand, before the hours of printing rather than after.
Your first project: the print-readiness benchmark — take thirty real children’s drawings through our software, verify each in the slicer, and catalogue every failure. Early projects run in software; physical printing grows as our Hong Kong print setup does — and your own machine experience is exactly what shapes it.
Track B — Materials & filament · for the materials tester
We intend to make a filament built for schools — and a classroom filament has to do things a hobbyist's does not: survive an unenclosed school printer, not smell in an unventilated room, print inside a school machine's temperature range, and not shatter when dropped.
We are not looking for a market report. You would design the structured tests candidate materials must pass under real classroom conditions, run them as our print setup allows, and write a specification a factory can actually build to.
Your first project: test candidate filaments against real classroom conditions — heat, smell, drops, an unenclosed printer — and write the first specification.
What you measure changes the product — and what you make printable is what children will one day hold in their hands.
Every project ends with something real for your portfolio — and when your work appears in something we publish, you are credited.
You will see how an early-stage deeptech company is actually built — the funding, the accelerators, the decisions, the parts nobody puts in a deck — by being part of building it.
One standing hour every week with the founder and a co-founder who read Natural Sciences at Cambridge and spent forty years making physical things at scale — spent pushing your work forward.
You commit to a project, not to a year. Each project ends with something shipped, and at each end you and we choose the next one. Tell us your exam timetable and we will build the schedule together.
What happens next: we reply to every application, and we review them as they arrive — early applications get early answers. The process is short: your email, one conversation with the founder at HKU iDendron — where you see both prototypes, live — and a clear answer. Batch 1 interviews run through September; first projects start October 2026.