David Brady introduced Yomith, a year 12 student at Kooringal High, and a participant at the NYSF at Brisbane.
Yomith thanked Sunrise for the opportunity to attend NYSF held at the University of Queensland in January 2020.
He gave an excellent presentation on this wonderful program for Australia’s scientifically talented final year school students. He was allocated to an Engineering interest group and attended all lectures, workshops and site visits in this group, named Mirzakhani, after an prize winning Iranian female mathematician.
In their college accommodation, he was a member of a floor group, whose “staffie” a former NYSF student ran events like toothbrush parties in the bathroom to get friendships developing.
Yomith visited a range of STEM focussed facilities eg the Centre for Hypersonics where he learned more about Engineers without Borders, and QUT research facilities looking at development of batteries. His favourite was the Boeing Test Centre, which trains pilots from familiarity with basic panels and switches up to experiencing full control systems in moving simulators. Students had a go, too.
Eminent lecturers from backgrounds in biodiversity, biomedical engineering, neuroscience and sustainability and physics spoke with passion about their chosen fields. Yomith was interested how the different subjects converge.
Practical workshop activities included the preparation of coding instructions for robots to go in circles (not as easy as it looks, apparently). In another workshop teams had to offer a solution to cleaning up the amount of space debris in space. The team had 30 minutes to prepare their response and Yomith had 1 minute to present it: a space ship with AI which could track the rubbish and fling it into the atmosphere so it would burn up.
In a third workshop, “Passion Pitches,” students practiced their public speaking skills and presented their special interest to all their fellow students. Yomith spoke about “vertical farming” a way of improving farming and yield by setting up layers of garden beds in a building.
Social activities included NYSF Olympics which involved running from station to station and solving puzzles at each station and “Marvellous Minds” with fast paced trivia questions for floor groups to answer.
At the “Nerds’ Night Out,” students could show off their talents such as one student whose talent was solving Rubiks cube in 12 seconds.
Yomith summed the whole experience as amazing in opening up the STEM pathways. He affirmed his interest in megatronics which links electrical engineering, software design and mechanical engineering. His aim is to develop robots with the encoding to do the functions we physically can’t.
David Gilbey praised Yomith’s organisation of his talk in his vote of thanks on behalf of the club and proffered the black box (mug) and certificate of appreciation
