Learning through innovation

BrainSTEM Innovation Challenge

Northcote High School took part in the BrainSTEM innovation challenge for the first time this year. The team included Milla Freeman, Katinka Weber, Krish Miglani and Oscar Straube. This is our experience of the program!

BrainSTEM is a not-for-profit organisation that gives students the opportunity to invent and develop an innovation in a research environment.

BrainSTEM gave us the chance to work and be mentored by an expert in a STEM field. The process involved researching, designing and developing a STEM product innovation for a specific topic over 12 weeks. Each week we would have meetings with our mentor at Swinburne University. It was really interesting to visit the Uni every week and see what goes on. Our team’s mentor was Dr. Charlie Ranscombe, who is an industrial designer and a product design engineer. He selected our challenge topic ‘water saving’ and guided us through our process. Charlie was very encouraging and taught us new ways of seeing things.

It has been a productive 12 weeks and we are very proud of the end result. Our project is called ‘The Green Tap.’ ‘The Green Tap’ is an adapter that fits on to any mixer tap. It has three settings that allow different amounts of flow and a ten second default timer. It is screwed on between the handle and mixer cartridges and used the existing mixer handle.

We worked hard to get our concept ready for presenting at the BrainSTEM presentation evening. We shared our product with the other groups, friends, family, teachers and BrainSTEM representatives. It was really great to see the ideas the other groups had been working on and their final products.

BrainSTEM has been an exciting, interesting and beneficial experience. We enhanced skills including teamwork, problem solving abilities and design skills. We also learned that STEM is not just about theoretical science and includes a wide variety of skill areas. We really enjoyed this opportunity and would recommend BrainSTEM to other students who are interested in STEM.

Thank you to BrainSTEM for the opportunity; to Swinburne University for partnering with the program; to our mentor Charlie for all your hard work and guidance; and to the staff at Northcote High School for your support.