A team of Kurri Kurri High School year eight students have won the Newcastle Sustainnovation Challenge, and now their idea could be made a reality by City of Newcastle council.
The team travelled to the University of Newcastle’s Q Building on June 15 and 16 to answer the question; how do we get our cities and community ready for the future of work?
Kurri Kurri High School’s team pitched their proposal for a sustainable app system called ‘Partnership Points’ to the panel of judges, and secured the win against eight other Hunter school teams.
Year eight student and representative for the team Peyton Berry said they first started thinking about why and what Newcastle would need to be sustainable in the future.
“We then planned what our perfect sustainable, smart city would look like which is where our idea Partnership Points came from,” she said.
“Partnership Points is an app where citizens of Newcastle can exchange sustainable acts such as recycling, using grey water and volunteering for points which can be redeemed through public transport or through offers promoted by local businesses.
“To make this beneficial for the businesses, we decided they could sponsor a week; for example, week one may be sponsored by a local coffee shop, and week two may be sponsored by headspace for free mental health checks.”
The team was made up of students from the gifted and talented 8 Blue Hub class; Ben Couperthwaite, Ryder Howard, Madison Minter, Savanah McLaren, Peyton Berry and Lewis Jones.
Head teacher of English at Kurri Kurri High School Samantha Golding said that she and Katie Merrett, who organised the group’s involvement, were very impressed with the students.
“We were really impressed with the quality of ideas that they came up with; how good they were at thinking about the future and what the future should look like, and the other reason is that they represented their school with such pride,” she said.
Ms Golding said day one of the challenge was meeting with lots of different stakeholders and getting their heads around the idea of the future and how different it was, and day two was to refine their idea and turn it into a formal presentation.
City of Newcastle will now work with the students on their proposal to refine it, and it will be considered for implementation.
Attribution: This article was first published in the Cessnock Advertiser