BrainSTEM Innovation Challenge

Northcote High School took part in the BrainSTEM innovation challenge this year. The team included Stella Russo, Lucy Rachman Vascotto, Flynn Rolfe, Tilda Exton, Toby Zeevaarder and Penelope Nixon. 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 ‘make bugs edible’ 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 a cricket incubator in which crickets hatch, grow and then are harvested for eating. The contraption removes the need for human contact and so hopefully reduces the ‘Grose’ factor when it comes to eating bugs. We made a prototype but given more time we would have liked to 3D print some elements.

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.