A team from Kariong Public School has taken out a state award in the 2022 Techgirls Competition for developing its Breakfast Club app.
Zyenna Hamblin, Sophie Luland, Rishika Satheesh and Aleira Holland were named the NSW Primary Regional Winners in the competition, run by the Techgirls Movement Foundation with their new Breakfast Club app.
STEM teacher Mark Nash said the competition is about young girls solving young people’s problems, so two teams from Years 5 and 6 at Kariong identified a problem that was important to them in their local community and took ownership in designing and building a solution.
“Teams were encouraged to align their solutions with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals targets,” he said.
Students learnt the basics of computer programming and came up with a mobile app business idea, testing the idea, writing a business plan, developing a prototype, and pitching it via an online video platform.
They spent 12 weeks completing four modules; ideation, research, build and pitch.
“Overall, the main goal is for the girls to become technology entrepreneurs,” Nash said.
The girls worked for many weeks with Nash, researching and developing their apps, using digital technologies and production skills.
“It was out first year of running this project although we have been running STEM for some years,” Nash said.
“We were the only public school to receive an award.
“This is a fantastic way of promoting girls in STEM, science and technology in particular – the girls got to do everything from identifying a problem and coming up with a solution to developing an app business plan to promote it to the whole community and writing lines of code.
“Team 1 chose our new Breakfast Club, which we will start on a trial basis one or two days a week next term, as its theme.
“Through the app parents and kids can see what’s being offered that day and parents can volunteer their time.”
Nash said the girls came up with the idea unaided.
“It’s important for the teacher to stand back a bit,” he said.
“Each team was allocated a female mentor – these were people who have worked successfully in technology.
“This was a wonderful achievement not only for lour school but for these girls in particular – this is what the real world is about and the competition encourages girls into science fields and technology.”
Terry Collins