2020 Techgirls Winners – Tech Girls Movement Foundation

2020 Techgirls Competition Winners

National Winners

PRIMARY SCHOOL NATIONAL WINNERS

Kidz Play – Good News Lutheran College, Middle Park, Queensland

Has your child got a different ability? Do you find it hard to find the perfect park? Well, this is the app for you. Playgrounds are important for all children – they are a place to be active, and to make friends. Did you know that not all children can play at all parks? If your child needs special equipment, it may be hard to find a park to suit your child’s needs. Our mission is to help everyone find the perfect place to play. The Kidz Play app lets you search a playground based on your child’s needs so that all kids can enjoy playing.

SECONDARY SCHOOL NATIONAL WINNERS

Community Connect – CC Homeschool, Central Coast, NSW

Our app, Community Connect, creates community spaces accessible through a digital platform, to inspire connections that would not otherwise be created. Community Connect does this by:

Creating job opportunities for young people within the community
Forming social clubs and groups based on similar interests
Providing collective resources for the elderly, young families, and disadvantaged individuals to get support through their community

By creating a sense of community, we are delivering an easy, accessible way to find human connection, which according to Maslow’s hierarchy, assists with the completion of the second and third levels of basic human needs, while also providing for the other levels as well.

Victoria

SECONDARY SCHOOL WINNERS

Safe Spot – Melbourne Girls’ College, Richmond, Victoria

Safe Spot identifies areas that may or may not be safe for LGTBQ+ people, minority groups, women, and other associated persons. It also identifies levels of crime in the area and what kind of crimes committed. The app enables users to review the specified areas.

Western Australia

PRIMARY SCHOOL WINNERS

Chicken Maths – All Saints’ College, Perth, Western Australia

During our research we found out that not all kids like maths. This affects their learning. They give up on their maths. You have to be able to read and write and do maths to be able to do amazing things in the world. Teachers told us that they give children maths activities that are just right – not too hard and not too easy. Our app will help kids learn in a fun way at their own level. We love chickens and we think children will love our chicken maths game.

New South Wales

PRIMARY SCHOOL WINNERS

Bio Be Aware – St Mary’s Catholic Primary School, North Sydney, NSW

Bio Be Aware will create awareness and education about Biodiversity within our community. This app has been designed to search up if a plant or animal is endangered, is it rare, is harmful or injured and how we can raise an alert to help it. You can take a photo, add your location and find who to contact for assistance. An additional feature is the community feed page, where the relevant rescue organisation updates the outcome of your original alert along with the ability to ask questions and have a conversation with people interested in biodiversity and saving our world.

PRIMARY SCHOOL HIGHLY COMMENDED

Farmer Connect – St Mary’s Catholic Primary School, North Sydney, NSW

Farmer Connect is an app that helps small farmers connect to local markets, people in big cities and food delivery services so they can sell more of their produce. It also lets people buy from the farmers online, which is its main purpose. Our main goal from the UN list is to help with Sustainable Cities and Communities, it will do this by having a more diverse and close to an equal amount of farm produce available to consumers. Farmer connect is aimed for people who shop at markets regularly and normal customers that would normally go to large supermarkets to get their food. To start with, this app will begin with consumers in NSW, but perhaps in the future, it will expand to other states too. We invented Farmer Connect to help the smaller farmers in our community because they are often being taken over by the bigger farmers and being forgotten about, leaving them in difficult circumstances.

SECONDARY SCHOOL WINNERS

Community Connect – CC Homeschool, Central Coast, NSW

Our app, Community Connect, creates community spaces accessible through a digital platform, to inspire connections that would not otherwise be created. Community Connect does this by

Creating job opportunities for young people within the community
Forming social clubs and groups based on similar interests
Providing collective resources for the elderly, young families, and disadvantaged individuals to get support through their community

SECONDARY SCHOOL HIGHLY COMMENDED

Aeluin – Caringbah High School, Caringbah, NSW

Aeluin is an app designed for students to help tackle problems related to stress, anxiety and time-management. This app will help students write down their thoughts in their personal diary, and be prepared for any upcoming exams and assignments with notification of tasks, calming music and colours. You can read great information about what causes stress and how to deal with it and call important numbers such as kids helpline and beyond blue. If you have purchased the extra feature, you will meet a fun owl, Ally, that asks you to rate your stress, helps you find parts of the app and guides you through meditations.

SECONDARY SCHOOL REGIONAL WINNERS

Eco Pocket – Maitland High School, Maitland, NSW

Our app idea revolves around solving environmental issues at a local level. It is planned to offer several ways to limit your contribution to climate change, ocean warming etc. We will do this by adding a variety of ways to conserve energy or use renewable options to make the users’ lifestyles eco-friendlier. Simple things such as scanning garbage to determine whether or not it is recyclable to help reduce the negative impacts waste has to the environment and preserve the rainforest and other places where natural resources such as oxygen, minerals, water, food and vegetation come from. Our app will also consist of guides that educate people on these environmental issues and ways to help solve them, for example; which clothes contribute less to ‘fast fashion’ and what energy companies and retail products are better for the environment. These points are all features we would like to include in our app to do our part to help solve the environmental crises of today.

South Australia

PRIMARY SCHOOL WINNERS

Brighten Your Day – Karoonda Area School, Karoonda, SA

For the tech girls competition 2020 we designed an app called ‘Brighten Your Day’. Our app is all about helping you with your emotional intelligence and mental health. Our community is working on supporting our communities mental health and with COVID and being isolated this has become a larger problem. In our app, you can play games, listen to music download pictures of your P.E.T.S (Personal Emotional Tools – taken from Jane Foster Mytern Program that our school uses) and design and create your very own city. We also added healthy eating tips and plenty of things to take your mind off being on your red road. Our app only costs $2.99 as well as lots of in-app purchases of $1.00. With our in-app purchases, you can upgrade and unlock features. We also have three sponsors which are The Council of Karoonda East Murray, Elders and Mallee Kids.

SECONDARY SCHOOL WINNER

Qualication – Woodcroft College, Morphett Vale, SA

The app Qualication has been designed to teach students in years 1-3 with the subjects History, English, Science and maths. The students will learn the subjects through worksheets, quizzes, games and books. This app has been created to help students who live on farms, COVID-19 lockdown and extra help for learning. The app has multiple different screens: signup, choose your grade, spelling quiz, addition and subtraction game, read a book and others.

SECONDARY SCHOOL REGIONAL WINNERS

Bin It – Karoonda Area School, Karoonda, SA

As a team, we wanted to solve an ongoing problem that will benefit our school and the whole community. Our community isn’t recycling enough and the school is consistently sorting rubbish that kids aren’t doing correctly. We decided to create an app which we will help you categorize your unknown rubbish into their appropriate bins. Some innovative features we have put into our app is a system with 4 different ways to help you find which bin your rubbish goes in. They are a search bar, a scanner, an audio microphone and a simple category list with the different bins. We hope this will help our community to know which bin to use, increase recycling in our community and reduce pollution and waste.

SECONDARY SCHOOL HIGHLY COMMENDED

Divorce Support – Woodcroft College, Morphett Vale, SA

Our product is for children who need help and support after and during their parents’ divorce. This app is not a substitute for counselling or getting help from professionals but it is a tool to help the child work through their feelings. This app will include a quote of the day, articles about Children’s Feelings so they know it is okay for them to feel the way they do plus other features.

Queensland

PRIMARY SCHOOL WINNERS

Kidz Play – Good News Lutheran College, Middle Park, Qld

PRIMARY SCHOOL REGIONAL WINNERS

H & W – Golden Beach State School, Golden Beach, Qld

H and W stand for health and well-being, the health and well-being of pre-teens. Our team wanted to change the problem of the health of students, including what they eat, staying exercised, as well as their mental well-being; how they really feel inside, their emotions, and how they mentally control them. We created an app that introduces pre-teens to exercises, and recipes to eat healthily. On the emotional side of the app, we included calming yoga activities and quotes and facts to make yourself feel happy and loved. It will help you control emotions, and what to do in hard situations.

PRIMARY SCHOOL HIGHLY COMMENDED

Outgrowing for Sewing – Craigslea State School, Chermside West, Qld

The app we have chosen to create is Outgrowing For Sewing. This app is available to children from 10+ and is a way they can learn new skills while being productive. Many second-hand clothing stores and lifeline bins are becoming overcrowded. Most stores that are based around second-hand clothing have been given too many items, yet cannot sell them. This results in most going to landfill. Our app is designed to reduce the number of old clothes being thrown away and to turn them into new creative items that children can be proud of by providing fun instructional videos.

SECONDARY SCHOOL WINNERS

Continued Clothing – Girl Guides Queensland Lones Region, Qld

Continued Clothing is a free app developed in the hopes of preventing more clothing than necessary going to landfill every year. To achieve this, the app gives users options on what they would like to do with each individual article of clothing in their closets. This includes giving them outfit ideas, ways to upcycle their clothing in new ways and, as a worst-case scenario, drop off locations for their local op-shops or thrift stores. Continued Clothing aims to diminish “wear once” concepts and help our environment. The app is aimed towards young women, specifically, teenagers however it is free for anyone to use who may be interested in finding new ways to use their clothing.

SECONDARY SCHOOL HIGHLY COMMENDED

My Social Anziety – St Aidan’s Anglican Girls’ School, Corinda, Qld

10% of teenagers have social anxiety and do not seek help. We have created an app that focuses on help teenagers between the age of thirteen and nineteen who have Social Anxiety Disorder. Our app is unique from other apps as we have included an artificial intelligence chatbot which helps users to manage their anxiety. The app also has links to pages like mindfulness and meditation, fun facts about social anxiety and games that can help with the disorder. The artificial intelligence is a hierarchy of helpers including the following: friend, counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists.

SECONDARY SCHOOL HIGHLY COMMENDED

Cancer Kickers – Townsville State High School, Townsville, Qld

Welcome to Cancer Kickers! Our app is designed to help kids understand cancer. If a kid is being affected by cancer (either by having it themselves or a close family or friend), our app is here to not only keep them informed but to help alleviate any stress that may build up. There is tons of info to read (on a variety of different cancers and what to expect), as well as mindfulness, colouring and games to keep their mind from going to a place of uncertainty and stress, and instead to a place of calm and understanding.

New Zealand

SECONDARY SCHOOL WINNERS

Butterfly – Waikato Diocesan School for Girls, Hamilton, New Zealand

The goal of Butterfly is to help teenage girls quit their bad habits. Butterfly tracks how many days you have been without your habit, offering you advice on how you could quit. We chose 99 days as the max milestone as this is how long it takes for something to become a part of your lifestyle, producing the best results for quitting a habit. Through this process, you will look after your own caterpillar, watching it grow as you slowly break out of your habit. When you overcome a habit, your caterpillar will transform into a butterfly, symbolising your growth.

SECONDARY SCHOOL HIGHLY COMMENDED

Saiki – Waikato Diocesan School for Girls, Hamilton, New Zealand

Our app, Saiki is a wellness app for schools to check in with students on a weekly to daily basis. Our app is targeted at high school students. Our app will benefit the school because it makes getting assistance more accessible for busy students and gives the staff an overall idea of how the students are feeling in the classroom. This can give the teachers more room to adjust their teaching styles to benefit the students overall. We thought this app would benefit the school community especially during Covid-19 and how this stressful time is affecting students.

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Awards

Zero Hunger

GRANT – St Joseph’s Catholic College, Lochinvar, NSW

GRANT is a not-for-profit app that provides a donating and receiving platform created to serve those going hungry or in need of extra assistance to access food. Our aim is to allow those who cannot afford luxury food items the agency to “treat themselves” and their families by having a say in what and where they eat. There are too many people who feel shame in public spaces such as cafes, restaurants and supermarkets because they cannot afford non-essential food items and we want to change that. Through the app, individuals can register to become a GRANT recipient and given access to donations and top-ups through a personal registration code, businesses can apply to accept GRANT recipients, and people can donate money through one-off and subscription models. We hope GRANT makes disadvantaged people’s food wishes come true.

Sustainable Cities & Communities

Plant Oasis – St Mary’s Catholic Primary School, North Sydney, NSW

Our app is designed to help people learn about and care for plants, ultimately helping the environment. It has features such as identifying any plants that you might have bought before and forgotten what type of plant it was and the necessities needed to care for it. You can also search for different plant species that you want in your garden. It can also tell you the best plants to grow in a certain season plus you can share your progress with other people on the app so that if you’re having trouble caring for your plant they can help you.

HelpYo – Girl Guides Queensland Southport Region, Qld

HelpYo is a platform that provides communities with an accessible form of communication. Rather than providing a market to sell and buy products, our product is solely focused on volunteer, donation and gifting services. We have developed HelpYo as we want to cultivate a giving, supportive and kind world where everyone shares their goods and services for the greater good of the community. HelpYo brings social groups together, provides accessibility, resources and services to those in need and reduced loneliness by bringing communities together. HelpYo provides a helpline within your local community to make your daily life a little easier.

Good Health & Wellbeing

Cancer Emotion Attackers – Good News Lutheran College, Middle Park, Qld

About 150 000 people in Australia will be diagnosed with cancer in 2020. That means that a lot of people will know someone with cancer, and a lot of these people will be kids. When a kid hears that someone has cancer they might be scared, sad, frustrated, heartbroken, angry or uncertain. Our app is for kids who have parents or close family members or friends with cancer and will help them to deal with this range of emotions. The app will help by making them feel more comfortable about talking about cancer and letting them know that it will be ok. We were inspired to create this app because the mother of one of our teammates, Eva, has cancer. By making this app we hope to help Eva and other kids who are in similar situations.

Medic 4 Me – St Mary’s Catholic Primary School, North Sydney, NSW

Our app was created because we realised that there were lots of problems in the medical world. We felt that we had to create something that was new and innovative for the whole world to use and enjoy. Our app has a meditation timer, symptoms diary, medical-based advice and first aid and emergency system button. We created these additions because we thought these were the things that most people would need to use if we were to create a medical app. We are very passionate about making everyone’s lives easier so we think this app was perfect for that.

Reduced Inequalities

Signing Bee – Windsor State School, Windsor, Qld

One in six people suffer from hearing loss and experience difficulties in communicating with loved ones and friends. That’s why we created SigningBee. SigningBee is an easy to use app that will use artificial intelligence to help you learn sign language. Using Google’s AI this app will provide feedback on your signing as you complete simple signing exercises. This friendly and colourful app is for people of all ages and is a new and fun way to learn. SigningBee is there to help you along every step of your learning journey.

Quality Education

Choretastic Treehouse – Good News Lutheran School, Middle Park, Qld

The Chore Helper’s Choretastic Treehouse Fun app encourages kids to do chores without starting a tantrum and whining by making doing chores fun. You can earn points by recording what chores you do. If you get a certain amount of points then you can buy items for your virtual treehouse. In the app, your character can move around the treehouse and pretend to actually be a real person. The app also helps you to learn how to do chores smarter and more quickly by watching videos. This app is suitable for children ages 5 to 12.

Tech Girls Movement Foundation Awards

Best App Name

Jinder – Mount Sinai College, Maroubra, NSW

This is an app for people who have lost their jobs in Covid-19 and in general. When you open the job finder app it takes you to a survey and in the survey, it will ask you questions about your personality. When the survey ends press done and it will take you to three different jobs that fit your personality. When you pick the job you want it takes you to start building your perfect resume. Once you’ve built the resume a link comes up for you to call the boss of that job. If they hire you, you get the perfect job!

Rubbish Royalty – Craigslea State School, Chermside West, Qld

When a community does not recycle, the environment is negatively impacted. Putting recycling waste in the general waste bin means more harmful rubbish goes to landfill, and it cannot be recycled and reused. This is harmful to our environment because general waste is then buried underground. If everyone recycles then we can reduce the amount of waste going to landfill. Unless our community makes changes, approximately 7 million tonnes of garbage will go into landfill by 2030! With our app Rubbish Royalty, people can learn how to recycle through a fun game. This will ultimately have a positive impact on our environment.

Best Business Plan

HelpYo – Girl Guides Queensland Southport Region, Qld

Jewella Award

Chicken Maths – All Saints’ College, Perth, WA

During our research, we found out that not all kids like maths. This affects their learning. They give up on their maths. You have to be able to read and write and do maths to be able to do amazing things in the world. Teachers told us that they give children maths activities that are just right – not too hard and not too easy. Our app will help kids learn in a fun way at their own level. We love chickens and we think children will love our chicken maths game.