On Saturday 31 August a group of extraordinarily gifted Newington boys competed in the NSW Young ICT Explorers Competition with fantastic success.

Young ICT Explorers is a non-profit competition, which has been created by SAP (who develop enterprise software and software-related services) to encourage school students to create their best Information and Communication Technology (ICT) related projects.

The competition’s alignment with the school curriculum enables students to apply what they learn in their ICT classroom to develop a technology related project. At the judging event, students have the opportunity to present their project to a judging panel of academia, industry partners and ICT professionals. Each project is assessed on the criteria of creativity, uniqueness, quality, level of difficulty and project documentation.

1st place in the Years 7 and 8 Category went to the following Year 8 boys:

• Rhys Watkins (8/MA)
• Simon Giordano (8/MO)
• Max Quinn (8/KL)
• Henry Mellor (8/JN)

These boys designed an App called “Crl Track” an application designed to benefit sales staff at an energy company by enabling them to access information about a cylinder via barcode scanning to access product information and highlight when supplies are running low. Several industry players and the judges were impressed with the app and awarded these boys first place for their innovative use of technologies.

3rd place in the Years 7 and 8 category went to two other Year 8 boys

• Massimo Marchese (8/LE)
• Michael Knox (8/LE)

They designed an app called “I.Will.Survive”, which offers support and contact information for students being bullied or who suffer from mental health issues. As a result of this design, they have been approached by UNSW and TAFE who have the desire to build the app further including collaboration with the boys.

Teacher Librarian Mr Adam Carron said while he encouraged the boys to enter the competition, he could not have anticipated the success the group would achieved.

“We are all very impressed with the standard of creativity and entrepreneurship displayed by these young Newington men,” said Mr Carron. “We hope to see even more entries for next year’s competition.”

As a result of their remarkable achievement, the boys have the opportunity to present and sell their inventions to a group of industry professionals from SAP and NICTE – some of the largest organisations dedicated to ICT research.

Congratulations Rhys, Simon, Max, Henry, Michael and Massimo for being pioneers for Newington ICT.