World Class Innovation

The SANE Academy was challenged to develop projects to resolve issues in the community. Dane explains:

Our Principal, Kerrie Heenan, was invited to attend a talk hosted by David Martin. David spoke about the Global Innovations Challenge which is a challenge where students from around the world compete to come up with amazing projects that help with community issues. Each school that participated divided themselves into groups to work on different projects/issues. After many weeks of work, officials came to each school and judged each project. The best project from each school competed in a grand final where the winner received a $5000 check to take the project forward. Second place received $1000.

In our first meeting with David he told us to come up with ideas that would help our community improve issues such as; Mental Disabilities, the Environment and Homelessness. All of the S.A.N.E (Science and Nothing Else) students and some of the Young Einstein students worked on different projects. Some of the different projects included a Sea Shovel that scoops rubbish off the ocean floor, a wristband that detects UV rays and tells you when to re-apply sunscreen and my team’s project. a pair of glasses that blocks out flashing lights to help stop epileptic seizures. The judges came back and judged our projects and our group surprisingly won. We were all ecstatic that we could go to the grand finale.

Before the grand finale the officials contacted us about certain requirements that the slideshow had to meet. We got to work straight away and we created different things such as a prototype pair of glasses using our 3D printer and a website. After a little while St John contacted us about how to make our presentation better. St John helped us a lot during our project and so did everyone else from Melbourne Polytechnic. Once we pretty much had our presentation ready, we wrote our speeches for our individual parts and practiced. On the day of the grand finale we walked to the car park and to our great surprise we had a limo instead of a bus, we were ecstatic and loved the limo ride. When we got to the Ivanhoe Town Centre we saw all the other participating schools. We were quite worried about how it would turn out as we were setting our table up. We talked and milled around for a bit before deciding to practice our speech. After we practiced how the speech was going to run we had some food that was supplied and anxiously waited for the presentations to start.

When they finally started we sat through three presentations before we had ours. We got up on stage and talked for a while before finishing up and sitting down again. After the other two schools finished everyone was told to grab some food and drinks while the judges decided who won. We nervously waited for the judges to decide who won. After ten minutes, everyone was told to sit back down and the announced the winners. We were a little bit disappointed and started packing up but as we were packing up David Martin approached us saying how even though we didn’t win he would still like to help us take it forward. We were excited at this news and talked amongst ourselves while we were packing up. We look forward to next year’s event.