I attended the WA Judging Final for the Young ICT Explorers competition today.

The standard of entrants was very high and I had some great conversations with students, teachers and parents. The students spoke about the real-world problems they were trying to solve, they described the design process and were not scared of failure or going in a new direction. Such great thinking, inventing and creating going on in WA!

You can read about the winning projects here.

I was particularly impressed by Simon Says by Ben (year 9) from Shenton College:

Have you ever wanted to be able to control your MacBook purely through your speech? With SimonSays, Year 9 Information Technology student Ben Gilchrist is making it possible for a wide range of users to work more productively than ever before. Ben’s software application will make it significantly easier for individuals lacking fine motor control to navigate and control their Mac OS.

Simon Says even worked with my English accent!