Year 10 students Erika West, Zac Seaton, and Blaze Brockman created Robopet for the STEM MAD National showcase. The students were awarded:
WINNER – Change It Up Social Entrepreneurship Award
WINNER – STEM Curators Award Secondary
FINALIST – STEM MAD National future is STEM Secondary Award
The students began by brainstorming issues in society as a group that could be fixed, including environmental concerns and human wellbeing. Collectively the concept progressed from an idea based on robotic pets comforting people with Alzheimer’s, which grew to a robot as an educational device to teach children how to properly treat animals and went from there.
St Bede’s focus on collaborative team-based learning helped the students with the skills needed to succeed in the event while also overcoming the obstacles of not being able to communicate in person due to the project being done during the confines of home learning.