Where will Digital Technology take you?

Welcome to Young ICT Explorers! Registrations for 2023 opening 1 February

Young ICT Explorers (YICTE) is a non-profit competition, created by SAP, supported by CSIRO Digital Careers and The Smith Family with the help of Industry and University partners across Australia, to encourage primary and high school students in years 3-12 in Australia to solve real-world problems or showcase their passions using technology. That could be anything from creating better ways to recycle, to supporting people with disability; from creating virtual reality worlds, to building  entire operating systems and robots from the future –students can use their imagination and their interest in the world around them to create projects, we want students excited about working with technology. The work we do directly with our partner, The Smith Family (TSF), is on a dedicated funding program, which enables disadvantaged youth to have equal access to participate and engage in the competition through our YICTE Accelerator program.

Think of YICTE like a science fair, but for technology and innovation instead. Our goal is to inspire school students of all technical ability levels to use their creativity and innovation to gain a greater understanding of the diverse possibilities available to them through today’s technology, encouraging students to consider future study and a career in tech, while solving real world problems with their choice of technology, with YICTE being the showcase event for students to attend each year. Projects can be anything created in class time, or students can enter extracurricular projects they are working on. YICTE compliments the school Digital Technologies curriculum, with almost any technology based projects eligible to enter! Students can work alone or in teams of up to four students (we suggest they team up!) To date, nearly 8,000 students have taken part, from approximately 850 school across Australia and New Zealand.

Podcast_YoungICTExplorers

Once teams know what they will create, they will need to enter a project report submission – this is an outline of the project, detailing what and why they created it and what technologies they have used. We will review these reports and organise judging times with schools for the teams to present their projects to our judges panels. Projects are marked on four main criteria – Creativity and Innovation, Project Difficulty, Quality and Completeness and how they Presented and Documented their work.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has made it impossible for the program to continue as normal with large in person event showcases. However, despite the challenges posed by COVID-19, we pressed ahead and have created the new Virtual YICTE model that we ran in 2020, still allowing students to showcase their projects to our judges, the panels are made up of industry experts and university academics in the field, these are held via Zoom sessions, or teams can send in video presentations, the teams receive written feedback from our experts about their creations, and we share their ideas with the community on our Flickr social media page.

Find a Young ICT Explorers event near you

event-brisbane

Brisbane

Date/Location: Virtual Judging – August – October.

Registration Open

event-townsville

Townsville

Date/Location: Virtual Judging – August – October.

Registration Open

event-sydney

Sydney

Date/Location: Virtual Judging – August – October.

Registration Open

event-melbourne

Melbourne

Date/Location: Virtual Judging – August – October.

Registration Open

WA

Perth

Date/Location: Virtual Judging – August – October.

Registration Open


YICTE: ACT, TAS, SA

Date/Location: Virtual Judging – August – October

Registrations Open