Crazy ideas come to life

STUDENTS from Ballarat secondary schools once again came together to brainstorm their innovative ideas.

They met at Ballarat Tech School last week to take part in the Ballarat Social Innovators Program, led by Crazy Ideas College.

The free program is aimed at helping young people come up with and pitch new products, programs, and services.

On Friday afternoon the year 8 students from Loreto, Woodmans Hill Secondary, St Patrick’s, and Phoenix colleges had a chance to put forward their ideas to a panel of assessors.

Josh Hayes and his group from St Pat’s pitched an app which encourages children to be active and pick up rubbish.

“Our idea we came up with was a program with a competition called ‘rubbish run’ where you download the app and it’s designed for school aged children to pick up rubbish while running and gain points towards a leader board,” he said.

“The person at the top of the leader board at the end of a month or three months would end up getting a prize whether it be sports equipment for their school or go towards some sort of money tab for the school.”

Loreto’s Lainie Ballinger and some of her friends focused on the theme reimagining learning.

“We came up with the question of ‘how do we really help people who struggle or don’t like school?’” she said.

“We were thinking of a platform where teachers and students can communicate and share ideas on how to create engaging lessons and students can contact a teacher and ask for help with anything they may be struggling with.

“We decided that we would try and contact the system Simon and on the teacher’s version they could have a little link they could access where they could share lesson plans and engaging ideas that they have used.”

Director of Crazy Ideas College, Zoe Burrows, said the program has proven successful and stood the test of time.

“We know that both the schools have been blown away by how much their young people have stepped up and we’ve had great commitment from young people,” she said.

“Essentially every school in Ballarat wants to be involved and it’s just how we do that.”

Yet, the program is not all theoretical, with some ideas coming in the past pitching days successfully implemented in Ballarat.

“We’ve had paper seed bags which have launched in Ryan’s IGA and they’re a compostable fruit and vegetable bag that’s about removing single use plastic,” said Ms Burrows.

“The bag has seeds in it, you plant it, and it grows into fruits a veggies.

“We’ve had a body positivity podcast called Young and You, Hire a Grandkid which partnered with a nursing home, a letter writing program between young and older people, the list goes on.”