One of the highlights of Education Week with for the NSW Department of Education is The Game Changer Challenge and it was a pleasure for Adobe to again be involved.

About 100 NSW DoE schools entered the 2019 Challenge and 18 primary & secondary school groups from all over NSW were selected to take part.

Schools involved were …

This year’s Challenge was How might we humanise technology?

The Challenge commenced on Tuesday 6th August at Google HQ in Pyrmont Sydney where the students and teachers were welcomed by Melanie Silva, Managing Director, Google ANZ as well as the NSW Minister for Education Hon Sarah Mitchell MLC and then had the opportunity to listen to a panel of expertise moderated by the Secretary of the NSW Department of Education Mark Scott.

The experts

• Scientia Professor Toby Walsh, University of NSW
• Distinguished Professor Mary-Anne Williams, University of Sydney
• Dr Matt Beard, The Ethics Centre
• Jillian Kilby, CEO and founder The Infrastructure Collaborative
• Lloyd Godson, Hastings Secondary College Marine Studies Centre
• Lee Hickin, National TechnologyOfficer Microsoft Australia

Hon Sarah Mitchell with the expert panelists

Following the panel session, the students met with an amazing group of facilitators who guided them through the challenge which involved using a design thinking approach to solving a problem focused on the  theme of humanising technology.

At the end of Day 1, all the students were bused to Parramatta where they had the amazing opportunity to stay at the Parkroyal Hotel ready for Day two at the NSW Department of Education Building on Phillip St, Parramatta.

Day 2

Day 2 of the Challenge involved dividing teh student groups up to take part in a range of workshop events including an Adobe workshop that I ran on Character Animator for the secondary students and an Adobe Spark workshop for the primary students run by Andrew Balzer from the T4L team at the NSW DoE.

Other workshops included sessions from Microsoft, Google, The University of Sydney, the Stem.T4L team at the NSW DoE as well as a how to design a pitch session buy the amazing story teller and poet Miles Merrill.

The students were all encouraged to take back what they learned from the workshops to their group with the aim of using their new skills and knowledge to help with their solution pitch on Day 3.

Makerspace

Following the workshops, the students met back with their groups to work on their solution pitch as part of a large makerspace session.

It was a pleasure to be involved with this event again and it is always a joy to see students collaborating, problem solving, designing and creating.

...this is what school should be like all the time.

In an interview I did with a teacher for a video story about this event (stay tuned to CreateEdu TV), a teacher said to me that this is what school should be like all the time. Great engagement, amazing creativity, so much learning and a wonderful way to help prepare these future leaders to help solve some of the big problems the world is (and will be facing) in the near future.