College all about inspiring crazy ideas

A PROGRAM encouraging secondary students’ outrageous ideas is returning to the region next week.

In early March up to 100 year 8s and 9s from Ballarat Grammar, Mount Clear College and Mount Rowan Secondary College will take part in Crazy Ideas College’s regular Social Innovators campaign.

The two-day workshop takes place at Ballarat Tech School and CIC’s program delivery lead Paige Banks said the initiative is about nurturing young people’s wildest concepts.

“The idea is we engage young people from throughout Australia with this workshop that allows them to invent products and services that enrich the lives of their fellow citizens,” she said.

“We identify their passions through various activities working with our main four themes being environment, health and wellbeing, community connectiveness and reimagining learning.

“From these passions, we group the secondary students together and run them through different workshops and encourage them to think outside the box from prototyping through to creation.”

Once the students’ ideas are prototyped, participants will pitch them to the program’s community partners on the second day.

Now in its fourth year, Ms Banks said the program has seen young people introducing innovative ideas into their communities.

“This has been hugely successful,” she said. “At first we were working with a couple schools in Ballarat and now we’ve got about seven different schools attached to this.

“Each year we try to get different schools and we have about four that roll this out to their year 8s and year 9s.

“We had a team recently create paper seed bags for fruit bags instead of reusable plastic ones. They’ve just been enrolled at their local IGA in their community.”

The students’ ideas will be shared on the CICBeyond online platform with the potential to be realised beyond the initial workshop.