Young engineers show off their grand designs

By Lachlan Ellis

Just 83 VCE and VCE VET design students have been selected, out of hundreds of entries, in this year’s Top Designs showcase – and two are from Moorabool.

John Cusmano and Cooper Pitts study Systems Engineering at Bacchus Marsh Grammar, and the two young men will have their work on display at the prestigious Melbourne Museum.

Around 900 applications were received from public, independent, and Catholic schools across Victoria, making the two students’ achievement an incredible feat.

But despite both sinking more than 100 hours into their respective designs, both were humbled by their selection by the exhibition’s expert panel.

Mr Cusmano created a device which sweeps an area for precious metals using GPS location, while Mr Pitts designed a system that reduces vibration transfer from a shelf to a floating, self-levelling platform – a particularly useful system to stop record players from skipping when records are playing.

“I was watching a TV show and I saw people fossicking in the Australian outback…I saw them dealing with heatstroke and safety concerns. I wanted to design a solution that made it safer for them, while maintaining the rush of discovering something and finding something special,” Mr Cusmano told the Moorabool News.

“I map out a couple of points through GPS, and the brain of the device calculates where it needs to go. It traverses that path trying to detect for gold, and once it finds it, it’ll drop a flag and continue on, so the person can come back later and dig it up.