Year 7 Innovation Project

Dilan Abeyaratne

Teacher - Year 7 Science

The innovation project is Brunswick Secondary College’s Year 7 cross-curricular assessment task, where students work on the same assessment task across the subjects of Science, Maths, English and Humanities. 

The Innovation Project was introduced in Science classes where students were asked the question, “What annoys you?”. 

Students were tasked with brainstorming ideas about issues in their daily lives which caused them annoyance.  Their challenge was to either modify an existing product, or design a new product and make it more ‘user friendly’. 

Students worked methodically to plan, design and create a product that could be used to make a task in their lives more efficient. 

They presented their work on a poster with annotated diagrams and dimensions of their products and some some were also able to design and print  3D models of their products and showcase them to their peers.

The submissions provided by the students provided a great insight into the young, creative and innovative minds here at Brunswick Secondary College!

Amelie Brown & India Pappas

Year 7 (7U)

When I thought I wouldn’t enjoy the innovation project, I was wrong! 

We were introduced to the project in Science, where we had to choose a product that we use in our everyday life and improve it so it’s easier and more enjoyable to use. 

There were different tasks we had to complete across the 4 subjects. In Science we had to design the product and create a poster about it, in English we had to write a persuasive piece about our product, convincing our audience to buy it, in Humanities we had to think about where we wanted to produce our product and then write a paragraph about it, and finally, in Maths we had to create a survey about our product and make a poster to represent the data we collected. Maths helped us with the project because the results from our surveys told us what people liked and disliked about our product. This meant we could make many changes to our product so that it was the best version possible. 

We chose to innovate a toothbrush that had a built-in toothpaste dispenser. We called this the Amindy Toothbrush. The toothbrush was a big hit, and it was lots of fun to design. Overall, I thought that the project was a fun and engaging task. I never thought that I would enjoy a project as much as I enjoyed the Innovation Project!!

Sabri Merhi

Year 7 (7U)

The Innovation Project was a fun, challenging project.  We came up with the idea to make a rain jacket that is not just waterproof, but also water repellent - meaning that the water can fall off it with a shake or two. In Maths, we surveyed the class to see what we should improve on [for our product]. In Humanities we worked on the costs and materials, and in English we wrote a speech on why you should buy the product.

Mila Clark 

Year 7

 I enjoyed the creative and problem-solving aspects of this task and had a great time using trial and error to make my product the best that it could be. I also liked how it was a project in other subjects as well. We collected people’s opinions on the design in math and used this Data to improve our design according to what the public wanted. In Humanities we considered the consequences of making our products (environmental impacts, how much it would cost etc). This was very interesting and got us to improve our product even further. 

Oliver Crouch & James Barwick

Year 7

The thing that stumped us for a bit was actually deciding what to have as our innovation.  

We thought of [designing] The Shiny Bird Scarer. We thought of this because as we were walking through F-Block, we noticed how much bird poop there was on the ground. The Shiny Bird Scarer is a shiny floor cleaning robot that cleans concrete, floors and carpets/rugs. The reason for it being shiny?  It is shiny because birds are actually scared of shiny things. 

Over the course of this project, we had a fun time thinking of what we should add and how to improve our ideas.  It was tricky creating a 3D model on Tinkercad because there were so many  shapes to choose from.

Amalia Ware

Year 7

Our task was to use the engineering process to design a product that solves a problem. This got us thinking about the different day to day struggles in our lives and how we can improve them. We had to research a problem in our lives and imagine the possible solutions. Then we had to plan out our ideas on how to solve our problems by looking at similar products and different materials. We had to create many designs of our product to find the perfect one that suited us. In math, we created a survey to get data and emailed it to our classmates, friends, family, and teachers to get their opinion on our designs and whether they needed our products. In English we created an oral presentation but sadly “The innovation expo” got cancelled and we didn’t get the chance to show off our ideas. Innovation was fun because we got to look at day-to-day items in a new perspective.