The Questacon Smart Skills team has officially finished touring for 2016 after returning from three action-packed weeks at the Gold Coast, Toowoomba and Northern New South Wales. Our Smart Skills facilitators were on the road presenting hands-on innovation and design workshops to 2632 excited school students across 38 schools.
Our workshops give high school students an opportunity to flex their creative thinking skills and build a solution to a problem. This tour, we challenged students to create their own Rube Goldberg machine – a complex contraption that combines random objects in a chain reaction to complete a simple task.
Other students got a chance to try out our fleet of portable wind tunnels. They were given a limited set of materials – foil, tissues, straws and paperclips – and challenged to create a prototype that would hover in the airstream for at least ten seconds. Not an easy task!
We were blown away by the enthusiasm and creativity of the students we saw. The best thing about our hands-on workshops is they are engaging for everyone – you don’t have to be a star student or a tech-wizard to get a kick out of tinkering, innovating and testing out your ideas.
The Questacon Smart Skills programme is proudly supported by our Principal Partner The Ian Potter Foundation and Technology Partner Samsung Electronics Australia.
