Techno Ai 2025, a competition pitting high school and graduate students against each other to develop systems utilizing cutting-edge technology and inventions that are useful in everyday life, was held at Kyoto University in Sakyo Ward, Kyoto City, on November 23, 2025. High school students holding multiple patents presented their ideas and prototypes to a panel of university professors, who served as judges.
The 29th annual event is co-hosted by the Kyoto University Center for Technology (Sakyo Ward, Kyoto City) and the Kyoto University Growth Strategy Headquarters (Sakyo Ward, Kyoto City). Fourteen teams were selected from 500 individual and team submissions from high schools and 45 from universities, competing on uniqueness, practicality, and maturity.
Momoka Kadena (16 years old), a first-year student at Meiji University Hachioji High School, won the grand prize in the high school division with a homemade device that collects microplastics floating in the ocean without entangling small fish. The device uses sound and light, which fish dislike, in the collection tank to encourage the fish to escape on their own, and has already been patented.
Kadena Momoka has attracted attention for obtaining eight patents since her elementary school days, including for "hangers that don't tangle using magnets" and "a device that uses static electricity to keep pollen from entering indoors." When asked about the secret to invention, she said, "Preconceptions are the cause of failure. The important thing is to keep experimenting and never give up, and to keep coming up with new ideas until the very end."
Other notable inventions included a simple hurdle provided for physical education in Timor-Leste (Kyoto Kogakuin High School) and glasses that allow you to see the stars even in bright city lights (Osaka Electro-Communication University).
The grand prize in the university category went to Okinawa National College of Technology, which developed an app that detects early signs of dementia from everyday conversations.
