"I'm practically giving them away, but that's what it will take to get this going. I've already ordered another 100."

Scott hopes to create a bicycle safety culture from scratches and believes it will catch on.

"If I can keep this up for 10 months, there will be a thousand helmets on this campus, and students will no longer feel like they stand out from the crowd if they wear one, which at the moment is the major sticking point with them."

In fact, selling the first 100 helmets has proved there is interest in bicycle safety despite warnings from his students that his plan was doomed to fail.

"They all told me that I couldn't sell any helmets to students, that nobody would wear them, that they didn't think they were necessary, that they didn't like them," he says.

"So this is totally new. I've been trying to get attention for the very idea, and I've been hoping that the administration of this university would wake up and take notice.

"I'm sure they will all get on board once they are presented with the idea. But right now... It's just me. That's because I'm just getting started and the very idea is strange and new here."

But it is not just university students buying the idea. Scott has also reached company executives, who also happen to be mothers. "I told them about my helmet campaign and accidentally sold three helmets. I would have sold four, but one of the mothers didn't have a bike."

To promote the campaign, Scott has run helmet design competitions, and one of the most popular designs featured a tiara attached to helmet. "Now I'm looking for a chance to buy some more tiaras. I'm waiting to get my hands on a clown fright wig, so I can add that to a helmet and one of my Chinese student friends is named Panda, so I'm making her a panda head helmet."

Before moving to China, Scott spent 30 years in the film industry in Canada, directing and producing television and movies under the professional name of Zale Dalen.

"It was a great career and I had a lot of fun, but I burned out on the stress and tension of freelancing and making things I was embarrassed to have anybody watch, feeding the in-satiable television mediocrity machine," he says.